


Heather and Gold

by muurmuur



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Almyra (Fire Emblem), Canon-Typical Violence, Crimson Flower Route, F/M, Fall of Leicester, Family, Getting Back Together, Post-Time Skip, Romance, Secrets, Sexual Content, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:00:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 52,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28247301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/muurmuur/pseuds/muurmuur
Summary: In the year 1185, Emperor Edelgard von Hresvelg invades the Leicester Alliance and takes its capital by force. Both the Sovereign Duke and the daughter of House Goneril fall to the Emperor’s men. In their deaths, the story of a free and brave Alliance ends.But for Hilda, the most important tale begins in the hours before the fall, during an evening shared in Claude’s bed. Despite what the bards later sing, she survives the death of Leicester, and so does her unborn child. She flees from her Imperial captors to hide in a humble country life, fearing the threat that the Emperor might find in a martyred duke’s son.Eight years later, a snowstorm blows the newly-crowned King of Almyra and his westward-traveling entourage off course. They find shelter in a rural homestead ruled by a little boy with their king’s green eyes.
Relationships: Hilda Valentine Goneril/Claude von Riegan
Comments: 80
Kudos: 123





	1. The Prince

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional CWs in the endnotes re: sex and violence.

While never under the illusion that the trials of motherhood would ease as her son grew older, Hilda had not fully appreciated the unique challenge of raising both a human boy and his wyvern counterpart until faced with the consequences.

“The third time this moon, ma’am.”

“Yes,” Hilda sighs. “The sheep.”

“Scattered them all over, he has.”

“I see.”

Her neighbor, Sven, a hard-worn shepherd of middling age and exceptional patience, draws in a deep breath and wags his head. “He’s a good lad. Always welcome at my table— like my own, he is. But that beast of his... it’s no pet, ma’am.”

“Of course.” Hilda braces a fist against her hip and squeezes her eyes shut with frustration. “I’ll speak with him. You have my word that the lesson will stick. And that he’ll be at your doorstep first thing in the morning, eager to help with whatever will make up for your trouble. Without the wyvern,” she quickly adds.

Sven nods. “As you see fit. Thank you, ma’am.”

“Thank you. For everything. I’m sorry that it’s gone this far.”

“Oh, no,” Sven counters, losing his nerve as most men do once they’ve broached an uncomfortable topic between friends. He grins and gives his head another shake. “It’s good to have a young’un in these parts again. Keeps an old man on his toes.”

“Not so old yet, Sven.”

Sven laughs and tips his cap at her as he steps from her doorstep onto the path pointing towards the dirt road beyond. “Not yet, no. Feels like it in the cold.” He rubs his hands together and warms them with his silvery breath. “Have that boy of yours bring a cart with him on the morrow, so’s that I can give him some wood for your fire.”

Hilda should laugh. Out of the brave few who call the hinterlands home, none can swing a hatchet like she can. But that isn’t the offer that Sven’s making. She knows that, just like she knows that proving her skill with a war-axe would ruin the humble life she’s made for herself and her troublemaking son. 

“You give him rocks to pull, too. Big ones, for each member of your herd that you can’t find.”

“Oh, we’ll find them,” Sven promises with a wink. “Fill out those scrawny legs of his yet. Evening to you, then, ma’am, and good fortunes on the morrow.”

“The same to you, friend.”

Hilda waves him off and offers him a warm smile. An icy, cutting wind howls in challenge across the hilltop. Sven hunches against it as he makes his way back to the gelding waiting for him at the low fence that marks the boundary of Hilda’s homestead. The horse snorts and tosses its head before it lurches forward in the direction of the distant chimney that tops Sven’s own humble wattle and daub home.

In many ways it’s an ugly sight: the piebald nag, short and stocky like all of the mountain breeds; the steely clouds and balding, mustard-yellow fields picked clean of the year’s last harvest. But there’s purple heather growing in the hills, too, even now that it’s turned cold. The puffs of chimney smoke on the horizon are cottony and whimsical. Each plume belongs to someone who Hilda knows well. Closest is Sven and his pack of fat, spoiled sheepdogs, all lovingly named and known to sleep at the foot of his bed. Next is Hadiya, the baker, an Almyran nomad grown less fond of traveling in her later years, blessed with contagious laughter and thick, soft arms always dusted with flour. With her lives old blind Arne, the closest thing they have to an alderman, if only because he’d been the first to build a home in the hills as a place to hide his leaking collection of moonshine stills. Next comes Harald and Inge, masters of the village’s sole set of cows, and parents to a brood of sons now all grown and traveled to distant and more promising towns.

They are a hardened folk. Hadiya is the only literate one among them, although she’s pestered her neighbors to learn for years. Hilda had been the one to tell them that they’d been at war, back when she’d run from the end of it to find herself in their hills. They know as little about the great kingdoms of the world as they do Crests and relics and magic. In a different life, perhaps Hilda would’ve found them to be nothing more than pitiful people trapped in the most miserable place in the world. As it is, her chest aches from the beauty of it.

But beautiful things require safekeeping. Hilda knows this better than most. A lesser part of it is ensuring that her son’s meddling doesn’t make things worse. She sighs and readies herself for retribution before shutting the door against the cold and turning on her heel to hunt him out.

“Arvid!”

As is often the case, she finds Arvid’s wyvern first. The creature slinks from the rafters spanned above the central room to cower guiltily at her feet. Hilda clucks her tongue. The wyvern, Azzi, a ruddy-scaled hatchling born from her own faithful mount, is young, still no larger than a pony, but like her son, its mischief is hardly limited by its size. All the same, it is no mastermind. Her gaze skips from the wyvern’s flattened wings to look for the responsible party.

She finds him sulking in the far corner, chin dipped low to hide his face behind the curly fringe of his dark hair. His arms are crossed defiantly across his chest— which at only eight years old has already started to broaden to match his quick-shooting height, answering the question if he would grow into a Goneril build with a resounding _yes_ —but even at her distance she can see the uncertainty in his green eyes.

“ _Arvid_.” Hilda steps across the square of the rug spread across the earthen floor, crossing her arms to match her son’s posture. He’s stubborn, but she’s the one he’s learned it from. “How many times have I told you to keep Azzi away from the sheep?”

“It wasn’t that!” The fire in the nearby hearth pops just as Arvid’s own temper flares. He flings his arms with boyish intensity, dashing forward to pace a tight circle along the patterns in the rug. “He’d never hurt them.”

“Sven doesn’t know that. Those sheep keep all of us warm, and put food on his table. You mustn’t bother them.”

“I wasn’t bothering.” He fidgets entreatingly. “I was _helping_. There were wolves. Four of them! Azzi scared them off!”

“And so did you, I imagine. Goddess, Arvid!” she groans, pinching the bridge of her nose in a failed attempt to catch her temper. “What would’ve happened if those wolves thought that you’d be more tasty than a lamb? You should’ve told Sven what you saw.”

“Sven’s old and slow, and he doesn’t know how to fight anything.”

“And you do, do you?”

“Yes! Some.” He balls his fists and brandishes them at her. She tries her best not to be charmed. “Besides, it worked, didn’t it?”

“Who’s to say? The herd’s been scattered. You’ll be the one to bring them all home, little knight.” She sighs and shakes her head. “And you’ll wish that you were only hunting sheep if I hear about you chasing after wolves again.”

Arvid stares hotly at his toes. What Sven had said before is true: he’s a good lad, and as much a son of the village as he is her own. To be honest, other than the first hints of his blooming build and the guarded secret of his major Crest, a stranger would never name her as his mother by looks alone.

“...s’not fair,” he mutters defeatedly. Hilda feels herself deflate as well, although she knows she mustn’t show it if she hopes to raise him to be a halfway decent man. She uncrosses her arms, urging him closer until he shuffles forward. He’s old enough now that he doesn’t throw himself into her embrace the way he used to, but he still lets her draw him close once she has her arms around him. She pets the tousle of his hair, resting her cheek against his crown. 

“Mum,” he grumbles. She tightens her arms. He squirms to make an escape. “ _Mum_. Stop it.”

“What is it?” She catches him by the sleeve as he turns to slip away. It’s fascinating to watch him change from a babe into a proper, thinking person, but that doesn’t mean that she can’t still read him. “What’s bothering you? Did you really think you’d get away with sending those sheep running across the hills?”

“It’s not— nothing,” Arvid insists. He’s not yet learned how to be a convincing liar. Hilda frowns. Her chest pinches from the look of his furrowed brow.

“Come here.”

She turns, woolen skirts scuffing across the rug as she drags a chair from the nearby table to a warm spot in front of the hearth. She pats the seat invitingly before adding a second at its side. She doesn’t sit until he does, still dragging his heels when he finally moves. She watches him glare at the fire until the knot between his eyebrows loosens slightly. He peeks at her from the corner of his eye.

“It’s nothing.”

“Fine.” She smooths her lap, toying with the braided hem of her plain surcoat. “But if you mean to become a great hero, my darling, you must learn how to fight _nothing_ , too. Not only wolves. So tell me what this nothing is, and let’s see if we can have a go at it.”

Arvid rubs the toe of his right boot against the hearthstone. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It seems to me that I like all sorts of things that don’t matter to you at all.”

The ache builds in her chest as he wrestles with whatever it is he wants to say. Usually she chides him for chewing his nails, but now she simply waits, hiding a frown as he worries the edge of his thumb between his teeth.

“Arne,” he mutters finally.

“Arne? Yes. Alright. And what has that old goat done now?”

Arvid struggles to stop himself from grinning at the epithet, dedicated as he is to the task of telling his story with solemnity. “I heard him talking to Miss Hadiya. I wasn’t _spying_ ,” he quickly amends, glancing at his mother before looking to the fire again, “just listening. Arne said that I was a bastard. Then Hadiya said that he was a bastard too, and ran him out from the bakery.”

Hilda grips her skirts until the scarred skin of her knuckles turns white. Part of her wants to kill Arne. It’s not like she’s not killed a man before. But Arne is old, and blind, and half-mad from drinking the swill he makes from rotten potatoes and dandelions. He also isn’t wrong. Besides, it’s better for them to call her son a bastard rather than tease at his true birthright. But that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t want to dig into the earth beneath the hearthstone to drag Freikugel from the dirt and lop Arne’s head from his shoulders for poisoning Arvid’s confidence.

Instead, Hilda sucks in a tight breath and reaches forward to grab Arvid by the shoulder. “Listen to me,” she starts, forcing herself to smile as she soothes a circle into his sleeve with her thumb. “Arne can say whatever he wants. So can anyone, for that matter. That doesn’t change who you are— or who you came from.”

“Mum,” Arvid counters, grimacing, “am I really like Arne?”

Hilda feels her cheeks go numb from the pallor of considering such an absurd idea. “My darling,” she promises him, leaning closer to stroke the back of her fingers against his cheek, “you are worth a thousand Arnes, and a thousand more if he were the King of Faerghus, for all I care. Your father was worth a thousand of him, too. And let me tell you something: when he was a little boy, I’m sure that if your father would’ve seen a pack of wolves hunting Sven’s herd, he would’ve saved them, too.”

She combs back the curls from his brow. “That voice inside your head, telling you to do the right thing? You know it, don’t you? That’s your father speaking to you. He and I may not always agree on everything, but if he were still here with us, he would’ve loved you just as fiercely as I do. You understand?”

Arvid shrugs. “I dunno.”

“You do, sweet boy,” she promises him, jutting forward to plant a kiss on his brow before he has the chance to dance away. “My dearest darling. My little gem.”

“ _Mum_ ,” Arvid groans, quickly exasperated. He stands from his chair to retreat from Hilda’s attempt to gather him up in a mortifying show of motherly affection. She laughs, pleased to see a poorly-hidden smile on his lips as he stomps into the kitchen.

“Wash up, then, and help your dear old mother with supper.” She slumps against her chair with a theatric sigh. “You know that I can barely lift a pot of water with my brittle bones.”

“You don’t have brittle bones,” he grumbles. All the same, he reaches for a pot hung from the rafters and fills it with ladlefuls of water from a nearby bucket. Hilda watches him while he works. She hides her smile behind her fingers. Better that he doesn’t see it. It must look bittersweet.

Arvid is resilient. Any boy raised in a place like this has to be in order to survive. It’s one of the reasons why she’d brought him to the hills instead of the cities she’d preferred as a girl. And Goddess, what anyone from that lost girlhood would say if they saw her now; how they’d mock the simple clothes she wears, the plain lime wash on her walls; the pockmarked pewter that makes up her tableware, scrubbed clean each morning in the nearest stream where she also bathes, competing with tadpoles for the icy meltwater.

Those same powdered nobles would never survive a morning spent hiking across the hinterlands to save a flock of sheep. Arvid will, just like he’ll survive Arne’s cruel honesty, and all the other barbs that will follow him into adulthood. No matter how well Hilda tutors him to read a map, no matter how many times he finishes the thick books she’d smuggled during their escape from Enbarr— no matter how well Hadiya teaches him to speak Alymran, without the faintest hint of a foreigner’s drawl, or how effortlessly he recounts the stories she tells him about eastern kings and ancient wars; no matter how tall and proud he grows, or if he accepts Freikugel’s siren song —Arvid will always be a peasant’s son. As much as it may one day embarrass him, so too is it a shield.

They killed the Riegans. They killed the Gonerils. Here is what remains: a bright, kind young boy peeling potatoes for his mother and sneaking his wyvern bites of mutton when he thinks she isn’t watching. It’s enough to live for, as far as she’s concerned. Arvid seems to have forgotten the incident with Arne entirely by the time they sit down to eat their supper. He chatters over his bowl of stew to share the details of his various exploits from the day behind them. Even with the occasional obstacle, he is altogether a happy boy. Hilda is happy, too. And yet later, after she’s shooed her son to bed and tended to the fire for the night ahead, there is a melancholy coiled in her chest when she lays herself down to dream about what had been before. 

* * *

When Edelgard first storms Garreg Mach, Claude tells them that she’s starting another man’s war. There’s no reason not to believe him. With spellbinding confidence, he leads the Golden Deer back home alongside a convoy of Alliance merchants and hanger-ons. It’s a parade more than it is a retreat. They gorge themselves on the merchants’ wares and sing songs to distract themselves from the pillars of smoke they’ve left behind. Each night they tuck themselves into their bedrolls and thank the Goddess that they weren’t born as Kingdom men. 

They arrive in Derdriu six days later. Claude takes up residence in the capital estate. Hilda does the same in the guest wing favored by four generations of Gonerils before her. It’s difficult to justify the long trip to the Throat. Holst is so very good at lording over the Locket, and Hilda is, quite frankly, terrible at it. She prefers the luxury of the Aquatic Capital, much in the same way that she imagines that her brother, despite his melodramatic letters, prefers to keep her out from under foot in whatever it is he does when he watches the Almyran border.

She invites Marianne to stay with her. Part of it is selfish, but mostly she knows that the woman is terrified by the idea of returning home. It’s not as if Marianne makes a particularly entertaining companion; but not like any of them do, really. When he isn’t in Gloucester, Lorenz domineers their luncheons with snide remarks about Duke Riegan. _See how Claude is always trailing at his heels_ , he chides over chamomile and cucumber sandwiches. It’s all nonsense, of course. Lorenz has always admired Claude, just like he’s always admired Duke Riegan, despite what his own father has to say about it.

Lysithea floats through the capital with downcast eyes, nose buried in her books. Hilda has never really understood her. The fall of Garreg Mach does not make them fast friends. Balthus briefly sneaks eastward until a bad bet sends him running back into the shadows again, much to Hilda’s disappointment, because at least he’s good at telling stories, even if none of them are true.

Ignatz formally requests a position in the Riegan guard. The Duke humors him, but just as Claude had promised, Leicester isn’t fighting a war. Claude ropes the newly-minted knight into inventorying the duchy’s vast art collection instead. Ignatz takes the task so seriously that Hilda only manages to lure him into dinners twice a month. Even then all he talks about are tapestries and ceremonial urns. She might as well not bother. Raphael, on the other hand, isn’t in the capital at all. Hilda does appreciate his letters, as straightforward as they are, and feels as though she’s very nearly made a friend out of his sister simply by the effort she’s expended in ensuring that Raphael doesn’t do anything too disastrous with his good intentions.

But Maya is not in Derdriu either, and Marianne is always in the stables, or hiding in the gardens, or shut away in her room. Hilda has other girlhood friends to call upon, but they’re all just parrots, really, repeating the same tired gossip from one parlor to the next. At the end of it all, she’s faced with the horrible reality that a life of leisure may not be as appealing as she’d once hoped. The revelation leaves her feeling unmoored. 

There is one exception: Claude, who is, of course, an exception to most everything. He conquers the capital in a season. Most members of the nobility had snubbed their noses at him when he’d first been introduced to court, whispering mean rumors about his lineage and his odd stories about a childhood spent just outside the public sphere. The gossip fizzles out under the tamper of his good nature. He is charming. Uncommonly well-read. Rakishly clever. A stand-out dancer. He is generous with the household staff and a favorite of the lay folk, who sneak him apples and fresh-baked buns whenever he finds himself in the marketplace. There is no question that he will soundly defeat Lorenz whenever the vote is called to name a new master to reign over the Roundtable.

Hilda may very well be in love with him. It is another inconvenient discovery. By principle alone, she’d never wanted to be associated with House Riegan. They are so hopelessly _dutiful_. The Alliance is not like the Kingdom, which fawns over its kings, nor Adrestia with its endless line of grim emperors pulled from the dustiest annals of ancient times. Hilda’s countrymen make a sport out of rebellion. It’s very much like tying two draft horses by the tail and whipping them in opposite directions, really: that Riegan drive for leadership, and Leicester’s impulse to buck authority at every trial. When she’d been a little girl her father had teased at the notion of betrothing her to Godfrey von Riegan, but even then she’d had the wherewithal to nip the idea in the bud.

And Claude is worse than Godfrey, who by all accounts was a timid and somewhat dim witted man. Claude rises before the sun and burns through late-night candles at a ferocious pace. There is no hope that Hilda could ever keep up with him. The more unsightly side of the matter is that she doesn’t have the faintest idea of how he feels about her. Despite all efforts to the contrary, she finds herself counting down the minutes between their semiweekly dinners. For all she knows, however, he’s simply too polite to bring an end to them as mere inconveniences to his inordinately busy schedule.

And he’s handsome, of course. Ever despicably more so as he grows older. The younger members of the court fight like tomcats to vie for his attention. Although she’ll never admit it to anyone, and puts great pains into appearing the opposite, Hilda is a creature built entirely from her own self consciousness. What more, she is a Goneril. All Gonerils are born to swing axes in inglorious places. She has the shoulders for it. The arms as well. No amount of jewels or silk will turn her into the willowy courtiers who rule the quarterly capital balls. And mustn’t they catch Claude’s eye? It’s not as if he makes himself a reputation for his chaste intentions.

It would be a miserable problem under most circumstances. It very nearly is, until the world complicates the matter. The Duke dies. To the surprise of no one, Claude is elected to his seat. Count Gloucester protests, as is expected. But then the Count leaves the capital, and Lorenz stays behind. He and Claude begin to speak in private: first infrequently, and then more often, until they are very rarely apart. Hilda would suspect something more tawdry if not for how poorly colored Lorenz seems all of the time, as if he’s made himself sick over an ugly secret.

Rumors of the war brewing outside their borders become more difficult to ignore. Suddenly there are gaunt-cheeked refugees scattered into the marketplace’s crowds. It becomes nearly impossible to source the Adrestian silver that she prefers for her jewelry-making. For the first time in a very long while, two minor lords challenge each other to a duel. The court is aghast when the victor strikes a killing blow.

Claude looks tired during their dinners. He asks Hilda to help him spread messages between key members of the gentry. At first she doesn’t know the reason for them, but it isn’t as if Claude hides it from her; rather that she doesn’t ask. It doesn’t matter. She wants to help him. In any case, Hilda isn’t stupid. The patterns are easy enough to read. As quickly and as deftly as he does most everything else, Claude throws the Alliance into a squabble to stem their hunger for something crueler.

And let it not be forgotten that Hilda is a Goneril. Her family is the Locket’s apex predator. The only creatures to challenge them for the title are the wildcats that make their dens in the Throat’s toothy crags. They’re amazing creatures, the wildcats: golden-eyed, black-eared. They can smell spilt blood for miles. Like all Goneril children, Hilda knows the look of it well. Death on the wind.

Claude tells them they’re at war four years after their ill-fated graduation from Garreg Mach. He tells them that they’ll lose it one month before Derdriu falls. At that point, death crowds the capital. Hilda stumbles over it when she takes to the marketplace, shivering as she eyes the mealy apples and wiry hares hung for sale. She sends her handmaidens to the Locket with their pockets stuffed with trinkets to pay their way home. Marianne goes with them. For some reason Hilda knows that it’s the last time that she’ll ever see her.

The worst of it comes when Lorenz disappears. Despite all of his efforts, Claude can’t quash the rumors that the man has defected. It sends the courtiers scurrying like rats into faraway summer houses and ancient family holdfasts. Eventually the Riegan estate runs out of crowded rooms. Soon Hilda finds herself in the audience of what remains: Judith, Ignatz, Nader, Claude.

“Here,” Claude sighs on that final night, drawing his fingers over the map pinned across the Roundtable’s broad face. The empty seats lined along its length seem to mock him. “The bulk of the Empire’s forces have positioned themselves to lay siege to the southern wall. We’ll have no option but to evacuate the city through the port.”

“You can’t mean to use the warships as _ferries_ ,” Judith scoffs. She jabs the blue circle of the bay on the map. “They’re our only hope of defending the capital.”

Claude shakes his head. “We can’t defend the capital. Our best strategy is to retreat and regroup on better ground. I’ve parleyed with Duke Fraldarius. He’s agreed to accept refugees in exchange for arms. If we combine forces, we stand a chance to defend the Fraldarius dukedom as a rallying point until a better opportunity presents itself.”

“Fraldarius,” Judith echoes sourly. “That’s no better than bowing to the Empire. It’ll be the end of Leicester if you pledge with the Kingdom.”

“Leicester survives if her people survive.”

“That isn’t how wars are done, boy.”

“It’s how this war will be done,” Claude snarls. It’s unnerving to watch him abandon his composure. His voice rips the air from the room. “And lost, if it comes to that. I won’t stand and watch our people be slaughtered. Tell your men to stand down and assist with the evacuation.”

“I won’t tell them to not fight for their country.”

“You will, or I’ll tell them myself after naming you a traitor. Is that what you’re after?”

The braziers stacked against the far wall crackle and spit. For a horrible moment it seems as though Judith will agree with Claude. Hilda eyes the rapier at her hip and imagines what it would look like if she were to draw it in challenge of Claude’s order. Ignatz wouldn’t stand a chance against her. Nader, maybe, but not with his wyvern left tethered outside.

Hilda could manage it. She feels the promise of it in the coil of her muscles as they ready to push her forward. Judith is clever, and quick, but a rapier isn’t an axe. The weapons build different sorts of strength. A Goneril will always win over a Daphnel.

It doesn’t come to that. Judith bulks, pushing off from the table with a snort. “Fine. As you wish. I’ll see to the evacuation.”

Claude nods. “Have them on the ships by nightfall.”

“Duke Riegan.” Judith spits the name like it’s a curse. She turns on her heel and charges briskly from the room into the hall beyond. Hilda hears Ignatz exhale. Nader’s bristly beard crunches beneath his fingertips.

“Always a firecracker, that one,” he offers lamely. Claude waves it off with the flip of his hand.

“Help her with it, won’t you? And Ignatz— the merchant’s guild. See if you can have them sort rations for the ships. Dry goods, blankets, fresh water. Tell them that the money will come after. I want you on one of those ships, too.”

“Claude, I—” Ignatz starts, but Claude cuts him short.

“I need you to meet with Duke Fraldarius’ men. I’ve promised them whatever we have to offer. We can’t let them think that we’ve come empty-handed. That’ll only encourage them to demand something more valuable than what we have to give away. You’re the only one I can trust to keep your head about you. Can I depend on you?”

“Of course.” Ignatz frowns at his lost opportunity to fight at Claude’s side, but he nods, too, dipping his chin low enough to make the respect in the gesture clear. 

“Good. Thank you. I’ll follow on wyvern once everything is done.”

“You gonna give them Derdriu?” Nader asks. Claude nods, eyes leveled on the map again.

“Cities are taken all the time. If we can survive this, there’ll be a way to win it back.”

“You don’t need to convince me,” Nader promises, laughing. He claps Claude on the back before trailing down the side of the table towards the door. “I’ve never fought a battle I didn’t think I’d be able to win. Hard call to make, but only a true leader can make it. Judith sees it, too. Don’t let that old hellcat bother you.”

“It’s fine, Nader.”

“I know it. So. Off to do your bidding, kiddo. Get some rest in the meantime. That map won’t change when you aren’t watching it.”

Claude smirks and waves him off. Ignatz follows, giving Claude a final, tortured look before he slips into the hallway. The tension holding Claude stiffly upright melts once he and Hilda finally find themselves alone. He sighs until he’s emptied his lungs, leaning heavily against one elbow as he combs the other hand through his hair.

“I hope that wasn’t a mistake,” he confesses lowly. Hilda’s breath hitches in her throat. It feels good to know that Claude trusts her enough to say something like that, but more than that she hates that he has to admit it at all.

“Of course not,” she tells him. “We can’t win against the Empire with six battalions and a few thousand Derdriu dandies. What are we going to do? Line up the cobblers and have them throw their shoes at them?”

Claude smiles weakly. His eyes are still steady on the map. She can’t help but look, too. A single marker remains on top of the star-stamped capital of their country in miniature. She imagines the pawn transforming into Claude adopt his white wyvern. He’s quickly swallowed up by the sea of imperial red surrounding them.

“You’re luring them into the city,” she realizes, voice tamped and quiet. He nods.

“They don’t have the ships to barricade the bay. Edelgard might be a conqueror, but she’s not a monster. She’ll let them leave once she’s realized what’s happened.”

“And what happens to you, then?”

He shrugs. “I’ll welcome them to Derdriu. To the vaults, most likely: to the victors go the spoils. It’ll keep them distracted until the fleet is clear of the shore.”

She stares at him. _What if they kill you_ , she wants to counter, but she doesn’t dare voice the words aloud. She feels her eyes water.

“I’ll stand with you,” she says. He looks up from the map with a kink in his brow.

“That’s not necessary.”

“It’s not about what’s _necessary_.” She drums her fingers along the table with feigned indifference.“Let me inconvenience them. If anyone understands something like that it’s me, now isn’t it? We might have to give old Edelgard the city, but that doesn’t mean we have to make it easy for her. Keep her at a distance, I say. Your archers can’t do that.”

Something fickle flickers across his face. She’s never seen it on him before. He looks away, flexing a fist against the tabletop.

“Alright. But only if they play the way we want them to, you understand? I want you to retreat at the first sign of real danger.”

“Sure, sure, Claude,” Hilda answers flippantly, hiding her nerves in the back of her throat. She jumps when he suddenly reaches forward to snatch her by the wrist. Despite how cordial they’ve always been with one another, it’s one of the few times he’s actually touched her. His grip is firm and warm.

“Promise me that you’ll retreat,” he repeats. The uncertainty from before is gone. It feels as though this is the first time she’s really looked at him. Maybe he’s not like them at all. It’s always been a poorly kept secret. He’d betrayed it outright when he’d invited Nader the Undefeated to Derdriu, as if Nader’s winning streak hadn’t been made against Goneril soldiers. They say that the king of Almyra has plenty of sons, but Claude is more than just a prince. She can see the weight of something tremendous yoked across his shoulders.

Suddenly she understands all of those old stories about knights bending the knee to pledge themselves to another man’s fate. Goddess, she’d always found them foolish, before. She looks Claude in the eye until all she can see is green. 

“I promise.”

* * *

She dreams about death. It gets so bad that she stumbles from her bed to hunch over her wash-bowl, hands on her knees as she retches and groans. Even awake she can still see Claude falling from the sky, scarlet blood streaming behind him like the ribbons on a maypole. She stares listlessly at her tossed sheets until she convinces herself that she’ll never sleep through the night.

The hallway outside calls to her. She listens, not bothering with a housecoat before she trails outside her door. It doesn’t matter. The estate is empty. The staff has been loaded into the ships in the harbor. She could scream, and yell, and run naked through those old, esteemed halls, and Claude would be the only one to hear her; only him and a handful of the most loyal ranks of their personal guards who have, with the turn of an afternoon, become Derdriu entire. It’s nothing more than a ghost town, now. Hilda wonders if that makes her a ghost.

She doesn’t want to examine the idea too closely. Her bare feet follow a path of their own making. They’re freezing by the time she finds herself at Claude’s door. She crosses her arms against the thin cotton of her nightdress and curses herself for how she always plays the fool in these moments when it matters. The door in front of her is framed in candlelight from inside. She’s not surprised that Claude’s awake, too, but that doesn’t mean that he wants her there. At least he’s still alive. She shakes away the memory of her nightmares with the toss of her head and steps backwards on her heel to run before he’s heard her.

It’s too late. The door swings open with a gasping rush. For half an instant Claude is terrifying: a snarl, narrowed eyes, teeth bared. It disappears as soon as he recognizes her. She watches as a wrinkle forms in his forehead from the slightest shape of a wince. His jaw dimples as it tightens but he steps back, too, clearing a path into his quarters without a word to welcome her.

She steps inside. It’s warmer, at least. Even without the maids, he’s managed to keep up a cheery fire. There’re sheets of paper scattered across the floor, all covered in his angular hand. Hilda traces their trajectory back to the empty desk from where they must’ve been flung.

“Claude, I...” she starts without knowing just exactly what it is she that means to say. It’s all absurd, anyway. She’s had nearly six years to tell him something more than the trite gossip they always share. Why would she think she could manage it now?

“Can I ask you something?”

“Of course,” Hilda answers, scrambling for the life preserve of his abrupt question.

“Why is it that you fight for Leicester?”

“Why?”

Is it a trick question? It doesn’t seem like one. Claude isn’t wearing the sly grin he so often pairs with his famous schemes. He looks small. Tired. There’s a lilt in his voice that she doesn’t remember, as if the late hour has lured out an old accent that he’s learned how to hide.

“Because...” she attempts, painfully aware of thinness of her gown, of how she holds her hands, of how strange her bare toes must look against the floor. “Because Leicester is all I have.” Claude’s face darkens slightly. He looks away. She isn’t certain why. It makes her heart race. “I was born to protect it,” she tries next, miserable now that she’s realized that there’s a right and wrong answer to his question. “All Gonerils are. The people. The earth.”

That doesn’t convince him. She’s lost his gaze entirely. It makes her desperate to better tell the truth. “I don’t believe in the Goddess,” she admits, words tumbling more quickly from her lips. “I never have. I’ve got no reason to fight for the Church. And Gonerils, we... we have thick blood. That’s what my father always said. I understand why Edelgard’s made this war of hers— I do, and I know that you do, too — but _Crests_... My father had one. His father, and his sisters, too. Holst. Me. I understand what Edelgard has done, but I won’t kill to end a system that’s never meant a damned thing to me at all. You know? But Leicester is real. The people are real.”

“I’ll lose it,” Claude replies. He sounds as if he’s got two fists squeezing the air out of his throat. “I don’t think I’ll ever win Leicester back.”

She isn’t certain what to say or what he wants to hear.

“Don’t die for it.” He’s begging her. It makes her want to laugh. Here she’s gone and pledged herself to him, and he feels like he has to ask for it.

“I won’t,” she breathes. It’s blasphemy, but it comes out easy. He flinches.

“Duke Fraldarius is a good man,” he says. “He’ll protect the people of Derdriu. Once the capital falls, Edelgard will have no reason to put the other cities to the sword. The Alliance will go quietly.” He swallows. A shadow drags along his throat. “Leave it. Would you? Could you leave it behind?”

Something in the way he asks the questions draws her towards him. Her steps don’t make a sound against the carpets. Nothing about the night feels real. Maybe she really is a ghost.

“Yes.”

He reaches out to her tentatively, as if he thinks that she’s only a twilight figment, too. His fingers brush against her cheek. She leans into his palm. Soon it will be the longest his skin has ever touched her own. He smells like vetiver and the woody polish they use for the leather on their wyverns’ tack. She can feel the heat of him better than she can the fire.

He kisses her. It starts slow. A charge sparks in Hilda’s mouth and travels down her spine. It ends low in her stomach and kindles into a fire. Claude take a shaky breath against her lips. She steals it from him, urging his tongue against her own. His hands drift from her shoulders down to her thighs, now flush against her as they stroke her. Her nightgown hitches upwards with his palms. The glow of the fire warms golden against her skin.

He’s not the first man to kiss her. There was a Daphnel, once, related to Judith through a convoluted line of second sisters and third sons; a bold blacksmith’s apprentice who had teased her about her metalwork in just the right way to win her attention; the Gautier heir, although that had stopped as soon as she’d realized that he used love letters like a flog; one of her pretty girlhood friends in the rose garden, once.

Such frivolous flirtation was spoken in a cruder language to what Claude so richly offers her now. They are competing lines of poetry, rhyming, chasing, hinting; stanza to stanza, him drawing her backwards, her dancing forward. The room spins like a carousel. They stagger against the desk, along the mantel, across the bookshelf, to his bed.

But Hilda is afraid. She feels her fear rise like a bubble in the honeyed pleasure filling her chest. The dawn is so close. She swears she can hear the imperial army’s drums. There are so few left to stand with them against the charge. Her gasps and moans fill the empty estate, answered only by Claude’s echoing baritone. She feels like a rabbit caught in a snare. There’s a frightening newness to the bulk of his body now slipped naked between her legs. She wonders if these too are the rules under which Almyran scions play: stolen kisses and groping hands, but nothing more. Wonders what it means to him to break them.

He kisses her. She tastes escape on his tongue. Goddess. She doesn’t want to die. She won’t survive if she’s left alone. Suddenly she’s desperate to anchor him inside her. Maybe if she holds him close enough they’ll bleed into one another and disappear. She wants to tell him that she loves him, but all she can manage is to gasp his name. His lips brush over her temples, her brow, her eyelids, her nose, her cheeks. A strange pressure fills her as he presses into her. It builds into something sweeter with the roll of his hips and the creak of the bed.

She kisses him until her lips ache. There’s a barter there, she knows, just like the slight tinge of iron from her blood on the sheets. Maybe it’s alchemy. Pleasure made from pain, love from fear, heat like none she’s ever felt before, molded from the estate’s cold breath; heat of the sort pressed between their bodies, which builds into a white ecstasy that blinds her and catches fire in Claude, too, until he finally slackens with a cry of her name and falls into a tangle of their limbs at her side.

The distance after is too far to bear. She slips herself into the space between his arms and tucks her cheek against his shoulder. He shifts until he’s found the right angles to fill the last few gaps between them. The dark has already gone. The shadows in the corners of the room have started to fade into a dusty blue. Next will come the bold yellow light of the dawn, and with it paired the flutter of their white banners. Claude strokes her hair and kisses her fingers until it comes, trembling when she grips him tighter.

* * *

The Empire does not come gently.

They are like hungry hounds after a hare, scenting where Derdriu has gone right to the salt-caked docks. Hilda and her men barely intercept them. Luckily the shine of their armor is more tempting than the ships’ unfurling sails. She tightens her grip around Freikugel’s haft and swings until her shoulders burn.

It’s horrible work, but she’s thankful for it, too. Edelgard has broken Derdriu’s defenses with infantry forces. Claude and his guard are deadly with their bows, but they favor mail and soft leather over steel, with which the Empire has equipped its own soldiers with abandon. Hilda’s guard is from Goneril, hand-picked by Holst himself. They dress like the mountains of their homeland: heavy, hulking, inexorable. It’s exhausting, but by the time the first of the warships makes it to the mouth of the bay, Hilda and her battalion have crushed the head of the imperial force. More will come, lured in by the sight of Claude on the white beacon of his wyvern, but that is their plan, after all. More importantly, not a single soldiers has broken their line to bring their own archers in range of his wyvern’s silk-thin wings.

“Fall forward,” she orders, smearing the blood spattered on her cheeks with her glove as she surveys the bodies scattered across the empty market. “Widen our circle. Let’s rally with Judith’s forces.”

“Lady Goneril,” one of her lieutenants replies. He opens his mouth for a further report, but is silenced by a tendril of purple-black fire that leaps suddenly from the cobbles and knocks him from his feet. Hilda’s teeth clatter in her skull as she dances backwards, swinging the heft of her axe to signal that her men scatter from where she has just ordered them to gather.

“Mages!” she shouts.

And worse than that. She recognizes the ugly bruised color of the blaze rising from the market’s stone. It must be Hubert. Maybe they’d been naive to think that he would serve as Edelgard’s envoy as opposed to her executioner.

“Hold the line!”

The Daphnel forces are their only hope. Hilda focuses on breathing deeply as she looks towards the nearby district where they’d embedded themselves earlier that morning. They have to come. It’s how they’ve always fought: speed, strength, finished with a deadly wash of arrows from above. The only question is how quickly Judith’s nimble swordsmen can make their way to the market. Hilda can stand strong until she comes. There is no other choice.

One of her men falls to the fire. Another is knocked backwards by a sudden rush of wind that sets two nearby stalls aflame like the bellows to a furnace. Hilda’s heart races in her throat. She can’t see them. They must be close to take aim at them like that, but the streets beyond the market are empty. She can’t swing her axe against nothing and hope to win.

“Forward!” Her men don’t move at her order, but they do once she makes an example of it herself. She paces them as best she can as to not open a chink in their defenses. Her gamble pays off: there, next to the bakery, a slip of black cloth and the pointed beak at the end of a mask. The sight of it makes her so angry that she nearly goes blind.

“ _Hra!_ ”

Freikugel cleaves through the mage’s shoulder. He shrieks, twisting his fingers for a spell which she cuts short with the quick flash of her axe head. She can taste his blood. It makes her dizzy. Holst had once described this feeling to her. There was a legend that the first Goneril had been mothered by a bear. Monsters, all of them. It’s why they’ve always been the sovereign’s headsmen, she supposes. She’s damn well not going to bring an end to the habit now.

The first dead mage leads her to the next. She chases them from their nest, snarling a war cry until her voice rasps and breaks in her mouth. It emboldens her men. The first hint of their fear in the market is replaced with triumph as they tear their enemy down.

Hilda keeps Claude at the corner of her eye as she advances. He must be doing the same with her, safe in the clouds as he watches Derdriu fall. It’s almost done. She can see the sails shrinking in the harbor. She feeds Freikugel’s screaming hunger in exchange for the promise of starving it. Claude will buy their freedom with their country’s riches. They’ll fly east and leave it all behind: the mud, the fire, the bloodshed. Maybe she’ll be a queen, someday. Maybe she’ll be a pauper. It doesn’t matter. As long as they both survive. As long as they don’t have to fight any longer.

“Here!” a man cries. She wrenches her axe from his chest and steps backwards to hunt out what he’s signaled. A pale, venomous gaze greets her from the shadows cast below the bell tower. A sudden sucking force traps her boot against the cobbles. She heaves against it, panic rising in her chest as the smell of sulphur and ozone spills over her.

 _Judith isn’t coming_ , a cruel voice of her own making whispers in her ear. _You foolish girl. You’ve failed._

 _Never let your foe unarm you_ , she remembers Holst once teaching her. At the time she’d thought it was unfair. In theory the advice was sound, but how many knights were bound to a war-axe nearly twice their size? It was easy to keep your hand on a sword. But now, no matter how heavy and ungainly Freikugel is, she’s desperate to keep hold of it. She tightens her grip even as a searing pain slices up her shins, sneaking beneath her plate like water as it boils her skin. She chokes on a cry that she refuses to let spill from her lips, all the while keeping her eyes steady on the white blip of Claude’s wyvern in the clouds.

She only needs to hold fast until the Empire decides it’s fit to let them surrender. The ships are nearly gone. Only a moment longer. The fire slicks over her thighs and across her stomach, turning the links in her chain mail to soft putty that sticks against her armor. Her fingers tremble and flex.

Only a moment, and maybe Judith will come.

The fire coils around her shoulders and teases at her throat. Hilda sobs when her palms finally lose the strength to keep Freikugel upright. The axe clatters against the ground. The magicked blaze transforms her into an animal gnawing at itself to escape its snare. She rips at her armor, moaning for the respite of fresh air on her burning skin. _Foolish girl,_ the voice whispers, but she can’t stop herself. She doesn’t want to die, she doesn’t—

She doesn’t want Claude to die.

It comes to her too late. She tumbles to her knees and watches his wyvern with blurry eyes. The creature rolls and fidgets. She can hear it shrieking with fury. There are footfalls in the square, too. More soldiers, all dressed in red, this time led by a figure in black carrying a gruesome sword. Hilda groans and struggles limply against the oily fingers gripping her tight against the pavement. So it was a trap: all of it, one stacked atop another, until the end.

She watches in agony as the white wyvern finally breaks rank. In many ways, it’s beautiful. It pirouettes and dives, quartzite wings flashing like lighting as it evades the first volley of arrows from below. Next comes the second, then the third. Claude is close enough for her to see the red points of his arrows as he looses them in retaliation. The ships in the harbor must see it, too. He is a god, righteous and terrifying.

“Good. Now,” Byleth orders flatly. He steps across the square as easily as if it were a morning-time garden. A new band of archers marches forward in his wake. Hilda rips what sound she can from her chest in fury. None of them pay her any mind. One of the men looses a flaming arrow into the wind. The others draw back their bows and wait until the flare has fizzled out of view before they let them loose. The sky darkens with a sudden storm of bolts shot from all sides.

The wyvern suddenly keels. Next it howls, shrinking as it draws its wings in on itself and plummets from the sky. She swears that she can hear Derdriu’s horrified shout from the ships as they watch Claude fall. His proud wyvern serves him even as it dies. It slows its descent with crippled wings, spilling him finally into the far corner of the square in a flash of white scales and scarlet ichor. Hilda’s heart races faster. The fall has knocked his bow from him, but Claude has already stood, pulling himself free from his wyvern’s fallen bulk to snatch Failnaught from where it’s scattered. He has the distance on Byleth, who is still four dozen paces from him. Hilda has never seen a man shoot like Claude. He could bring the war to a standstill if he kills Edelgard’s tactician; end it, even.

Claude reaches for his bow in synchrony with Byleth’s draw for his sword. The latter unfurls like a whip in the air. It cuts Claude’s arm from his shoulder with a smooth flick before recoiling towards its master. Pins and needles prickle along Hilda’s skin. All the color of the world sucks into the red of Claude’s splattered blood. There is no crackle of the fire or clatter of plate as the imperial battalion advances— only Claude’s agonized scream as he collapses to his knees. Byleth silences him with another curt swung of his arm. The world opens up to swallow Hilda whole as she watches Claude fall backwards under a strike that slices him open from his stomach to this throat.

The sword returns. Byleth drags its dirtied edge against his cloak and turns. It doesn’t matter what else he does. Who he is. Why he exists at all. Hilda relents to the drag pulling her down. It tumbles her onto her back. The sky looks back at her, empty and unmoved. She wants to tear it apart with her teeth. This damned, horrible world. What a damned way to die. 

* * *

Hilda wakes tense and sweating, the way she always does when she dreams about burning alive. She groans, rubbing at her eyes as she slowly takes stock of what’s real. Her skin is scarred and mottled, but she’s alive. Derdriu is days away by the fastest horse. The sun has just risen over her little, humble house, and that means that her son has overslept his punishment of herding sheep out in the hills.

She sighs and rolls from her bed. The room is cold. The world outside must be even colder. She shrugs on an extra coat over her dress before shuffling into the common room. Arvid is there, to her surprise, bent over the hearth as he stabs at the embers with the poker.

“You’re late,” she observes wryly. He jumps, offering her a slack grin as he tries to hide the poker behind his back.

“Not really. Just wanted to say goodbye.”

“Hm.”

“And I was thinking, maybe, that Azzi—”

“—will be staying here, just like I promised Sven yesterday. You’ll be doing this the hard way, clever boy.”

“But _Mum_ ,” he groans, dashing to the windows and flipping over the shutters with a loud clack, “look, it’ll snow, I know it. See there. Look at the clouds.”

“You’d better be quick, then.”

“ _Mum_.”

“No son of mine will be defeated by a bit of snow. And he also won’t back out on his promises. Hm?” She snatches his coat from a nearby rung hammered into the piecework wall, flagging it with a flick of her wrists before offering it in his direction. “Have you eaten something?”

“Yes,” Arvid grumbles glumly, snatching the coat before shoving his arms through the sleeves.

“Good. There’s some scones still there, too. Bring them with you. And the cart. Don’t let Sven go too far. You know he limps when it snows. You bring those poor sheep home before they freeze, alright?”

“Yes, Mum.” Arvid pockets the scones, a recent bounty from Hadiya’s ovens. He drags on a woolen cap next, followed after by a pair of gloves and a cloak covered with a furry patchwork that makes him look more like a bear cub than a boy.

“Be careful.”

Arvid huffs a wordless sound. Hilda hugs him anyway, squeezing his fuzzy shoulders before pushing him towards the door.

“Mind the road. It might be icy.”

“ _Yes_ , Mum.”

“Be home by dark. Let Sven know I’ll have words for him if he suggests otherwise.”

“ _Yes, Mum!_ ”

Arvid storms the road. The cart clatters behind him. Hilda leans against the main door and watches him until he’s nothing but a blip against the grey horizon. She sighs once he’s gone, eyes darting to the low ceiling of clouds gathered above their heads. He wasn’t wrong about the snow. Regrettably, that means it will be a busy day for her as well.

She breaks her fast on the last scone left on the platter before dragging on her own heavy cloak and trudging for the nearby barn. Kala, her wyvern, greets her with a happy croon. Azzi is snuggled against her side, enjoying the rare opportunity to bask in his mother’s attention rather than playing a supporting role in one of Arvid’s elaborate plans. Hilda wrenches open the door leading into the cellar dug beneath the barn, and reemerges with a heavy salted hock slung over her shoulder for the wyverns to enjoy.

Next comes a fresh scattering of hay and oats for the goats, who bray and snort at her from their fragrant pen. The same is prepared for their old mare, Bluebell, who had been Arvid’s favorite before Kala’s egg had transformed into his scaly companion. Afterwards come the chickens, who are equally mean to both Hilda and her son, although she supposes she can’t blame them, keen as they are to eating them.

It’s time consuming work. The first flakes of snow start to tumble from the sky by the time Hilda retreats to the house for a mid-day meal of leftover stew from the night before. Afterwards she hunts down an armful of old blankets to keep Kala— far too large now to snuggle in her bed at night the way that Arvid does his own wyvern —warm. She hauls them to the barn and drops them into a pile with a sigh, afterwards batting fleecey fuzz and stray threads from her arms. Her back aches. The chill has started to seep through her clothes. She never really was much of a homesteader.

Rather than return to the miserable task of mucking the goat stall, she lingers to daydream from the open door. The snow has started to fall in earnest, now. The hills have all softened under its blanket, rolling outwards in endless waves that make her feel like she’s been tossed into a pillow-ful of cotton batting. But like most everything in the hinterlands, there’s danger in it, too. The wind has started to pick up. She can hear it howling in the heights of the clouds.

She knows Sven won’t put Arvid in any danger, but she can’t help but worry over him. There’s a chance he’ll be snowed in until the morning, which means she’ll get no sleep at all, dreaming up ways that he’s twisted his leg at the bottom of a ravine or fallen victim to those damned wolves. She sighs and rubs at her eyes. Goddess. How will she survive him growing into manhood? She can only pray that he takes to shepherding, and adopts Sven’s herds instead of chasing glory anywhere further.

“Mum!” 

She gives her eyes another rub, certain that she’s dreaming. But when she opens them she finds that no, there he is, that son of hers, still tiny on the horizon, waving his arms to greet her as he shouts into the swirling snow. As he comes closer she sees that he’s followed by more shapes twice his size. There are more of them than the village boasts in its full number. Her heart leaps into her throat. She looks for imperial red, lips pulling back into a grimace as she gropes for something to swing. Her simple anxieties from before are stamped out by a crueler and far more honest fear.

She’ll kill them. With her fists, with a damned pitchfork, Goddess help her, she’ll kill them if they’ve come for him.

“Mum!” Arvid jogs closer. There’s a breathless grin spread across his lips. “ _Visitors!_ ”

“Come here,” she hisses, waving him towards her with a tight swing of her arm. His mouth slackens with surprise. He glances with wide eyes between her and the approaching men. They’re close enough to see through the snow. She snatches Arvid by the forearm and drags him to her side while she takes in the sight of them. They’re dressed in dark traveler’s robes. No armor. The wyverns stalking on foot behind them explain it, all of them hunched against the growing tempest of the approaching storm. Riders, then. They don’t wear the winged helmets that the imperial cavalry prefers. Instead their heads are covered by the hoods of their cloaks, which flash open down the middle as they step through the snow. Even in the flurry she can see the glitter of gold thread in their dress. She takes a studied note of the craftsmanship. They may not be imperials, but neither are they simple bandits, nor merchants lost to the storm.

“ _A Fodlani woman?_ ” she hears one question in Almyran. 

“They can’t fly in the snow,” Arvid explains, frustrated by his mother’s lack of excitement over his news. 

“ _The boy said she was his mother,_ ” another man replies. Hilda snakes her arm around Arvid’s shoulders and pulls him closer. She’s raised him too earnest, she decides with a sinking sense of dread.

“My esteemed lady,” the man at the front of the procession greets her.His voice carries an accent that turns her mother language into something far more melodic than it deserves.“Good afternoon.”

“Good afternoon,” she answers tightly. The man smiles, making a fair attempt at keeping up his good posture despite the way the wind has started to push him over.

“I beg your forgiveness for our intrusion, but it seems as though this storm upon us has no intention of letting up. I’m afraid that it has grounded our humble party and left us stranded. Your generous son has offered us the promise of shelter. I do not mean to hold you to it, although I will admit that we would be in your debt and most thankful if you were to provide us with what aid you would find acceptable to give.”

Hilda smiles flatly at the man’s flowery words. She’s never met a liar who speaks plainly. But it doesn’t seem as though she has much of a choice. There’s eight of them altogether, not to count the wyverns at their back, which are larger than any she’s seen in a very long time. She hears Kala snuffing and snorting at the scent of them. Hilda didn’t raise her for war. At best the wyvern could help them flee, but the snowstorm will ground them just as easily as it has the men at her door. She grits her teeth and nods, stepping backwards into the barn to give them the clearance to come inside. Arvid watches her with a crumbled brow, still stupefied by how tightly she keeps him tugged at her side.

“You are truly a godsend, my good lady,” the man continues. This time it sounds as if he might even be telling the truth. He leads his party into the barn, first stopping at the threshold to do his best at shaking off the snow gathered on his shoulders. Once inside, he pushes off his hood to reveal himself as a young and comely man.

“My name is Baraz,” he says with a bow. The others file in as he speaks. Four of the others are shaped like him. The final three seem slight enough to perhaps be women. They all look as uneasy as she feels about sharing the barn. Hilda isn’t certain if that’s a good sign or a threat. “At your pleasure.”

“ _You mean to make the king sleep in a barn?_ ”

“ _I’ve slept in worse before,_ ” another voice drawls. It turns the blood in her veins into ice. The group parts to make way for a man at the rear, who mimics Baraz by sloughing the snow from his clothes before he enters the barn. He is tall but not towering, and broad at the shoulder. His silhouette is made wider by the proud cape peeking out in golden strips from beneath his cloak. He bows his head to slip off his hood as he steps inside. His hair is dark and long, styled backwards from his brow to end in tousled waves at his jaw. He wears a short, tidy beard that nearly hides the shape of a scar skipping up his throat into the left corner of his mouth. His lips are drawn into a smile that looks far too courteously precise to be sincere. It breaks when he lifts his eyes to look at her. They are the same emerald green as her son’s.

“You’ve—” he’s already started. It dies in his throat. The settled calm of his face twists into a haunted stare. “ _You._ ”

She can barely hear him. Her heart is hammering in her ears. She swears that she can taste blood in her mouth and smell black fire. 

“Mum!” Arvid cries in alarm as she slumps against his small shoulders. “Mama!”

The barn erupts into a scuffle of boots and muffled calls of surprise. She slides into the blur of it for a moment before she takes stock of where she is: crumpled on the floor, with Arvid propped under one arm, his face a miniature of the second figure looming over her, and in its anguished look the same. 

She fights against the twist of her mouth. A sob still slips free. _An alchemy_ , she remembers, somehow, the words as old as her son: from the snow, gold. From death, life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional CWs: In section 3, loss of virginity (consensual, but with conflicted narrative); in section 4, brief description of dismemberment


	2. The King

After Derdriu, Hilda wakes from burning in a room she doesn’t recognize. She needs no touchstone. It’s obvious enough where she is. She doesn’t remember the specifics of death, just that it comes for everyone, at the end. Two women are hunched over her. They’re both dressed in veils. She supposes one could be Sothis. Should she repent? What could she possibly say? There’s nothing dogmatic about her regrets.

“She’s awake,” says one of the women. The two part to make way for a third figure dressed in soothing shades of lavender and violet. A fresh spit of fire kindles to life in Hilda’s chest. This time it is of her own making. The women startle, bowing forward to press against her aching shoulders as she thrashes to tear into Lorenz with her nails.

“Kill you,” Hilda rasps. Lorenz winces but stands his ground. She can feel her tender skin twisting and tearing under the women’s bracing hands. “ _Snake_.”

And so it is, despicably: not the afterlife, but what is left of Leicester. A dying woman and a traitor.

* * *

“Your wounds have healed well,” Lorenz says a lost set of days later. She can feel his presence bearing down on her, but she doesn’t turn from her side to look at him. Instead she balls her sheets in her fists, watching as the angry skin on her knuckles cracks and glistens. 

“I have brought you something to eat.”

A set of china clinks as it’s set aside. Lorenz sighs. She isn’t certain if she’s ever heard a sound like that from him before. Uncouth, he would’ve said, back when he’d been the man she’d cared for.

“At the very least, I shall not leave you to your peace until you’ve had the broth. I know that you haven’t been drinking the water brought to you.”

“No.”

“Hilda, I will not allow you to starve yourself under my care.”

She leans against her shoulder to shift finally in his direction. He makes an effort to remain unflustered, but she can see the way his cheeks grow grey from the sight of her. And what a sight it must be. She can feel the weight she’s lost in the way her knees grind when she lays curled in her bed. The nurses have been unsuccessful in their attempts at washing her hair.

“So pick another method,” she snarls. “Have you lost your spear?”

He looks away. She wonders if he would defend himself if she lurched forward to squeeze her fingers around his throat. If she weren’t so lightheaded she would try it.

“Has it not occurred to you,” he offers suddenly, his voice pinched and quiet, “that I did not come to Enbarr of my own accord, but rather under an order?”

“You expect me to believe that you left us to die because of your _loyalty_?”

Lorenz’s chair creaks as he leans forward. The smell of his cologne fills her nose. He’s suddenly so close to her that his hair spills against her cheek.

“Yes. Because of my loyalty to the man I served,” he whispers roughly. His genteel mask has broken. There are tears in his eyes, not spilled, but held against his lashes like fat amethysts. “In denial of my own self interests— my own judgment, even. Because that is loyalty. It is given unconditionally. I...” His thin brows quiver and knot. “I did everything I could to play the role given to me. I’d like to think that I played it well, but the Emperor has no love for me like she does her advisors. I failed, Hilda. There is blood on my hands. I do not deny it.”

“Blood on your hands,” she scoffs. “Speak plainly, Lorenz. They cut him apart. Quartered him. _Alive_.” Her voice breaks. “Claude meant to surrender. If you expect me to believe that you were following his orders, you must’ve known his plans. Hanging your head from Derdriu’s walls wouldn’t pay the price for your _loyalty_.”

Lorenz’s lips twitch. “Yes. A heavy price I shall no doubt one day pay in full. But before that time comes, I have another responsibility to fulfill. I will not disappoint him twice. So eat. Please, Hilda.”

Hilda rises onto her elbows and leans towards him until the tip of her nose nearly brushes his own.

“Go fuck yourself,” she spits. 

* * *

Hilda eats, in the end. Her body punishes her for it. The bland soups and porridges Lorenz leaves at her door roil like poison in her gut. Maybe they are. She would suspect Hubert, if not for the fact that she has nothing more to give him. That’s clear in how, with the exception of her purple-haired gaoler, she seems to have been entirely forgotten. She learns that the nurses who worry over her are under Lorenz’s personal employ. So too is the quiet girl who comes once a week to change her sheets. 

Hilda suspects that he’s paid for her room as well. Despite how she feels about, it isn’t a cell. Her bed is soft. There is a fireplace, although someone has dragged a heavy grate in front of it, which she imagines has been done so that she doesn’t burn anything down. The dogwood trees growing outside her window tell her that she’s in the south. That’s enough to confirm where they’ve brought her, although she would’ve known it even if they’d tossed her into the depths of the imperial dungeon instead.

The sun rises and falls. She decides that there’s nothing to be gained in counting how many times it happens. Either Lorenz has bargained with Edelgard to give her a comfortable purgatory before she’s executed, or she’ll be trapped in this room until she grows old and finally dies. Neither end would be surprising. She’s a complication. Leicester doesn’t love her like it does Holst, but she’s still a Goneril. Better to keep her as far as possible from the dry kindling of her people, to whom she could be the final spark to set them afire. Not that they could possibly win anything from another rebellion, but even Edelgard must know that men from Leicester would rather bury themselves alive than be seen bending the knee.

Lorenz brings her books to read. Hilda collects them unopened beneath her bed. She buries her days in sleep. Dreaming is a torture. She wakes with her sheets twisted around her, skin chilled by sweat, her voice hoarse from shouting words she doesn’t remember anymore. The nurses regard her with pity. Holst once told her that all Gonerils were born from a she-bear, isn’t that right? So it’s true, then, and here she is: the end of them, starved and mangy, toothless, cowering in a cage while her minders smear peppermint ointment over her scars.

She’s asleep when it changes. The lock in her door tumbles open. She wakes when she hears it turn tight again. A quick set of footsteps advances across the room. So this is the end, she thinks numbly, toying with the idea of opening her eyes.

“Hilda,” Lorenz urges. The bed creaks and shifts under him as he sits at her side. “Wake up.”

The room is dark. She doesn’t understand why he’s come to her in the night, but there’s nothing good about it.

“Hilda. For the love of the Goddess, _damn you_. Wake up!”

His vulgarity startles her. She turns and finds him cowered over her. His arms are filled with dark cloth.

“What do you want?” she growls. He shoves the bundle at her. It’s a cloak: navy, with a gold cord around the hems, well made. The feeling has started to return in her fingertips. Velvet, she thinks.

“I want to help you,” Lorenz says. His voice is strangely harried. “In this damned place. Do you have any idea what it takes to keep something like this quiet in a city that hears each pin drop, every...” He combs his fingers through his hair, struggling to calm himself. “And despite the fact that my every action is done in your best interest, you fight me at every turn. To what end? How do you imagine my life to be outside of this room?”

“Turn-cloak. I hope you suffer.”

He laughs ruefully. “Of that I have no doubt. And suffer I shall, no matter how you treat me. Can we agree upon that, at least? I am your only friend in Enbarr. You need not care for me. Hate me, even, Hilda, so be it, but you must also be honest with me.”

“I hate you,” she agrees. Her voice quivers. “What else would you like me to tell you? You’re a coward. Weak. Conniving. Just like your father. We should’ve put you both in irons.”

“Perhaps,” Lorenz sighs. “Can you please dress yourself?”

“I will— in steel. If you keep me as your plaything for too much longer, Lorenz, I’ll grow strong enough to kill you.” She stands on shaky feet, wringing the cloak between her fists for want of his traitorous throat instead.

“Good!” Lorenz staggers backwards to begin to pace the length of the room. He claws at the gloomy night as he speaks, bitter words taking shape in the wave and shake of his gloved hands. “Bring your fearsome axe down on me, Lady Goneril! But until that day comes, Goddess help you, you must be honest with me.”

He’s getting at something. It’s absurd. As if she could have possibly hidden anything from him, trapped as she’s been. Whatever secrets she’d once held are irrelevant now. Claude is dead. So is Leicester. There’s no buried treasure for the Empire to find.

“The child,” he says, the bitterness in his voice replaced by something more akin to regret. “You should have told me. Alone you are safest here in the palace, but with this consideration — space, I think,” he adds awkwardly, dipping his head to study the carpet below his feet, “is what is most important now.” 

“Child... What child?”

Lorenz frowns. “Hilda, please. The healers have told me themselves. They have no reason to lie. They worry only for your health. As do I. It was terrible enough that you went hungry for so long. And the chill,” he adds, nerves tangling his voice tight again, “this miserable place is an icebox. You need sun, and fresh air. Goddess, if you would have only _told_ me.”

“What child, Lorenz?”

He pauses mid-stride to turn and look at her. The way his face has fallen makes her knees buckle. She slumps to sit at the side of the bed.

“Hilda...”

No.

It’s impossible. Cruel. Her eyes blur until she’s blinded by hot tears. The cloak slips free from her arms. She gropes her fingers along her stomach, unsure of what to feel for except for her nightgown and the ropey scars beneath it.

“Oh, Hilda.”

She grits her teeth and listens as the floorboards creak when Lorenz kneels beside her. One of his hands hovers over her, either too timid or too clever to break the space between them.

“So it is as I suspected,” he continues quietly. “Listen to me. There is an estate that has been in my family for generations—not far from here, but far enough, in the country, along the Airmid. My utility to the Emperor has been exhausted with the closing of this damnable war. She will grant me leave from Enbarr. I suspect she will be glad to be rid of me. And as distasteful as they find me, so too am I owed... _compensation_.”

Hilda’s tears spill free from her lashes. She smears them across her cheeks.

“They will see the efficiency in it. My name is ruined.” Lorenz’s voice wavers. “It will ruin you, too, in the ways that are most convenient to them.”

“No,” Hilda whimpers. She’s not so certain as to which part of his scheme she’s answered, just that she’s suddenly desperate to fight whatever she can. His hand falls finally against her arm. His touch is light and cool.

“There is no other option,” he promises tightly. “Two years ago I knelt in Derdriu and pledged my fealty. Our country may be gone, Hilda, but honor does not come from castles, or crowns, or soil. I am a knight of House Riegan. I will serve it until I die. You may very well be the one to bring an end to me, I do not doubt it, but until that time comes, you cannot stop me from helping you. So for the love of the Goddess, dress yourself and come with me. Quickly.”

* * *

Lorenz’s Airmid estate is small and uncharacteristically humble. It is old, no doubt once in the possession of an ancient Adrestian lord or lady later married into the Gloucester line. There is no staff to greet them. The small stable is empty, as are the cellars and the limited collection of rooms, each one draped by their last master years before and since covered in thick layers of dust. It takes only two carriages to bring them there: her, Lorenz, the two healers who had saved her, the timid chambermaid. 

Lorenz is good on his word. He and his small retinue prepare a room for her before leaving her free to it behind an unlocked door. That night a platter of roast rabbit caught during their ride is brought to her, although like before, Lorenz doesn’t join her in the meal. She sleeps fitfully in her unfamiliar bed. And yet somehow she wakes feeling rested, and for once recognizes her own wan face in the tarnished mirror hung on the wall.

“Good morning,” she greets Lorenz after she’s dressed in the simple frock left for her in her new wardrobe. He turns from his inspection of the birds’ nests fished from the flue of the main hall’s fireplace to watch her descend the staircase in quiet stupefaction. 

“Good morning,” he echoes politely.

“I think it would be helpful for us to talk.”

He nods and brushes the soot from his palms before gesturing towards the nearby sitting room. They’ve been busy. It too has been turned over. A broom is stood in the far corner from an earlier sweep of the floor. She takes a seat at a small tea table and waits quietly until Lorenz does the same at the other side.

“I hope that you are well,” he starts. She nods, eyes downcast as she fiddles with the hem of one of her sleeves. He pulls on a pair of gloves hunted from his pocket like a man arming himself before a duel.

“I’m not going to marry you, Lorenz.”

He clears his throat to hide the surprised noise she’s scared out of him. He smooths his hair and perfects his posture before leaning ever so slightly closer to her from across the table.

“I understand that this matter has been brought about rather abruptly,” he begins. “And so perhaps my intentions have not been clear. While I do not mean to challenge your charms, Hilda, my proposal is intended only for your protection, and for the protection of your child.”

“No one is going to believe that the child is yours.”

His jaw grits tightly, but he does a fine job of hiding it behind the flicker of his fingers. “While there are sure to be gossips in every corner of this world, I can assure you that few of them find themselves here. This place will serve our purposes well enough, but it is no Fhirdiad.” He clears his throat again. “I can stand to be called a cuckold by two excommunicated holy sisters and a chambermaid.”

“You really want me to believe that you’d dedicate the rest of your life to raising another man’s child?”

Lorenz frowns. “Not just any man,” he corrects her. “You needn’t pity me, although I appreciate your concern. My fate would have brought me to this responsibility regardless of the path behind it.”

“I won’t name them a Gloucester,” Hilda continues stubbornly. Lorenz sighs.

“And perhaps in the future you shan’t need to, but that day has not yet come.”

She shakes her head. “And in the meantime? This is a fine enough house, Lorenz, but it’s nothing more than a prison if we can’t leave. That’s no life.”

“It is a fine enough life if it means that your child lives. Edelgard’s top priority is keeping the country united. She will not tolerate insurrection— not even the promise of it. You know that Leicester is a powder keg. There is no other option.”

“There is. Help me find my brother. Holst knows the eastern hinterlands better than anyone. He’ll...”

She’s interrupted by the sudden pallor blanching Lorenz’s face. He looks away. A cruel frost settles in Hilda’s chest. Images of her brother flash through her mind: his smile, broad and generous, pinned at either end with dimples, paired always with a glittering wink. Everyone loves him. How many other generals have won so many battles with truces drawn the night before? Leicester called him a hero. This isn’t how any story is supposed to be written, she bargains helplessly with herself. Heroes don’t die at the end.

But grief is as deadly as magefire, a voice inside her head reminds her, even as a shocked sob breaks in her throat. Her hand travels to the subtle swell of her stomach and braces protectively above her navel. She scrubs at her eyes with her free arm and draws in a shaky breath.

“Balthus, then,” she croaks. “Do you know if he still lives?”

Lorenz’s brows arch, pained. “I have not heard anything to the contrary.”

“Could you find him? Get a message to him?”

“Yes,” Lorenz replies with a nod. “If a letter can reach him, I can see to it that it does. But what is it that you want to tell him?”

“I’d like him to find a place where we can hide. As far from Enbarr as we can manage, away from the nobility, from Leicester, from... everything.” Her lips tremble as she struggles to collect herself. “To live freely. That’s what I want.”

“Hilda, forgive me, but to imagine you living as a pauper, I cannot abide it.”

“I’m not asking for your permission,” she counters, her voice taking on a crackling, sardonic tone as she pats at her damp nose. “I’ll do it even if you try to stop me. But if you were honest about your loyalty to House Riegan, you’ll do a better job of protecting it if you help me instead of standing in my way.”

Lorenz stiffens and shakes his head. “This is madness,” he tuts. “You are a duchess, not a milkmaid.”

“I was never a duchess. They killed me before I had the chance to become anything like that.” She grips the edge of the table and watches as the ruined skin of her knuckles pales. “I have one purpose now, just like you. Help me see it out.”

“...Very well,” Lorenz manages after a long and tortuous pause. “But only under the condition that you stay here until the child is born.”

“Lorenz—”

“I won’t have you giving birth in a field.”

A sudden bolt of laughter slips through Hilda’s lips before she can bite it back. It’s followed with another pitiful sob because Goddess, it’s all madness, isn’t it? Holst, Claude— Lorenz, squirming in his seat as he tries his best to talk about childbirth without imagining the particulars. 

“Fine,” she decides, if only to pacify him until she’s had a better idea. He nods. They wrestle over the silence for a while. She traces the shape of a flower inlaid into the face of the table between them. Her nails have started to grow long again after having been broken short from clawing at her burning armor. She tries to focus on them instead of everything else. A tickling curiosity chews at the nape of her neck. She traces four more flowers. Finally she can stand it no longer.

“Lorenz... Why did you do it?” Lorenz glances away. She presses on. Speaking is better than listening to the ringing in her ears. “Even if we’d somehow won the war, you would’ve lost your seat, to have pledged yourself to another house.”

“Yes, well...Sometimes we must fight for something greater than ourselves,” he mutters.

“Did you love him?” 

He flinches and turns aside, cupping a hand over his lips as he stares over his fingers into the adjacent window. She watches a telling line form between his brows.

“Did you?” he answers roughly.

“Yes.” The news of Holst’s death bears down upon her with renewed vigor, bolstered by older regrets. “But I never told him.” She squeezes her fingers into a fist and flexes until her joints ache. “Claude died because of me, and I never even...”

Lorenz lurches forward to scoop her hand between his own. Somehow she doesn’t recoil, despite everything that’s happened.

“You may call me a sad old fool,” he admits, gingerly smoothing his fingers over the back of her hand, “but, knowing that there would be nothing more between us, I enjoyed giving him counsel. He’d never do as I told him, but he liked the game of it, at least, I think. When he wasn’t pestering me about empire-making, he would ask me questions about the illustrious House Goneril. At first I suspected it was because— well, of course, you are aware that his father—”

“Yes,” Hilda interrupts. No matter the miserable circumstances, she won’t allow Lorenz to make her look as though she’d known nothing about Claude at all. He nods.

“Yes, right. Naturally. His questions seemed predictable enough until he began to ask after your suitors, as if I had the faintest idea of who was visiting with your father to seek out your hand. To be frank with you, it made me... jealous. Perhaps to an unflattering degree. Not that my cynicism had any sway on Claude. As is obvious to me now.” He catches her eye, finally, reflecting the same tortured stare that she must be giving him, too. “He loved you, Hilda. And you stood with him until the end. I wish— more than anything—that it would have been kinder, but at least you gave him that. He gave you what little he had left to give in return. Let us find some solace in that, at least.”

Hilda isn’t certain just what _solace_ looks like, or how its held, or cherished. There is no doubt that it pales in comparison to warm skin, strong hands, green eyes. But she sleeps better that night. Her nightmares become more evenly spaced between benign, forgotten dreams. She spends her days helping Lorenz tidy up his countryside estate, and her evenings teaching the household staff of three how to tat lace. The last of her burns calm into scars. The season changes, and then it changes again. 

She fears that Lorenz has forgotten their promise until he brings a letter from Balthus a mere three days before her son is born. The letter is left unopened at first, overshadowed by the absolute perfection of the little boy she brings into the world. It’s only after she’s convinced herself that Arvid will exist even when she isn’t watching him that she fishes the letter from her desk drawer. _Hilda_ , it reads simply: _anything you want done, I’ll do._

So she asks him to find her a home. In many ways its almost serendipitous. Surely there is no man so skilled at disappearing as Balthus. She instructs him to look outside the Abyss and Kupala, not eager to leave Lorenz’s sunny prison for a subterranean replacement, and unwilling to risk bringing unwanted attention to his mother’s reclusive clan. Balthus informs her of his success six months later. It takes three more for her to convince Lorenz that little Arvid is hardy enough for their long eastward ride.

The staff all cry when they say their goodbyes. She swears that she spots Lorenz dabbing at his eyes, too. Arvid coos and babbles in farewell. He giggles when the hardy mare that Lorenz had gifted them starts off on a trot. It’s an easy enough ride, although it makes it clear just what Hilda has sacrificed once the trees thin and the plains grow ever more bleakly fallow. Finally, after seven days spent picking her way over craggy cliffs, she finds herself at the doorstep of a little house built on the crest of a barren hill. She would’ve cried at the pitiful sight of it if not for how Balthus suddenly emerges from its door, bent nearly double to fit. He rushes to scoop her up into his arms, planting smacking kisses on the top of her head until Arvid wakes in his sling across her chest and warbles a confused cry. _Aw, geeze,_ Balthus sniffles, awestruck when Arvid reaches forward to snatch his finger with a tiny fist, _look at you, little man._

Eventually he collects himself and gives Hilda a grand tour of her new home. First comes the barn, still filled with sawdust from when the last timber had been fitted only days before. A pair of goats bleat at them when Balthus slides open the door. _From our purple haired friend_ , he explains, which goes for the handful of yellow chicks peeping in the coop outside as well. Lorenz has to do with the furniture inside, too: the table, the chairs, the bed frame and the simple cradle packed tight into the house’s singular bedroom, which Hilda supposes is decadent in its four walls, really, when most other homes like it have only a single room entire. There is a central hearth that feeds both the bedroom and the common room outside it, and a separate fire for the kitchen, along with a larder already packed with an assortment of strange, pickled things. Her eyes settle on the loft above the common room, which seems the perfect shape for little boys once they’ve built the balance to climb up the ladder to reach it.

The little house is practical. She convinces herself of this fact, forcing down the disappointment of an impending life filled with goat shit and earthen floors. Balthus catches a scrawny, hairy thing for their dinner. Hilda burns it over the fire. They choke it down with stories about Holst. She makes it through them all dry eyed. Afterwards she offers a spot near the hearth for him to sleep but he turns it down, citing fears that his bad luck will find her if he lingers for too long. He isn’t wrong. She hugs him tight and waves him off until the hills swallow him up again. Next she makes a second inspection of their larder and stirs the hearth’s embers into a cheery flame.

Arvid is a calm child. He settles into his crib without a fight once he’s hugged a beloved goldenrod blanket to his pudgy cheeks. Hilda watches him fidget in his sleep for a long while before the unnerving call whispering in her ear finally convinces her to return to the common room. It’s a familiar sound. She isn’t certain if she should be surprised to hear it, although she has to wonder if her son does, too. She paces the house’s short boundary, eyes darting across the simple walls and empty corners. Finally they settle on the hearth. A large slate stone sits before it. She can just make out a set of lines worn into the floor around it.

She crouches and digs her fingers under one of the corners. The slate pulls up without much resistance, just as she’d suspected. Freikugel lays waiting for her impatiently, wrapped in thick canvas dirtied by its hiding place. She winds her fingers around its haft and pulls it from the hole, testing its weight the way Balthus had swung her in his arms hours before.

Lorenz is responsible for this too, she knows, although she isn’t quite certain how. Surely Edelgard had hidden Hilda’s axe in some locked trophy room. A rare hunger for vengeance builds at the back of her mouth until she swallows it. She gives a final test to Freikugel’s heft before turning to rebury it. The sight of a second bundle stops her short. She sets her axe aside and reaches for it with trembling fingers. It doesn’t welcome her like Freikugel had, but rather seems to writhe unhappily in her grip. She peels back a corner from its wrapped canvas and stops, breath hissing short, when she spots the arched curve of a bow.

She shoves both relics back into the earth and drags the slate atop them. Not a gift, she realizes too late, tumbling forward on her elbows to finally weep over everything she’s lost: not a gift, but a grave.

* * *

She wonders, eight years later, if Failnaught called Claude back to her. There seems no other earthly explanation for why he and his retinue would come here, of all places, especially not dressed as they are. The rich colors of their clothes seem like a mirage after so many years spent living in drab cotton and off-white wool. And maybe there’s something to that theory, for surely it feels like nothing more than a hallucination when the man wearing Claude’s face helps her to her feet after she’d all but fainted to the floor. He appears similarly affected. The one named Baraz darts forward to insert himself in the stunned silence trapped between them, apparently unsure if his first priority is to pull the damp cloak from Claude’s shoulders or to worry over the woman who seems to have bewitched him.

“Mum!” Arvid answers on behalf of all of them. He grips at her hand, mimicking the way she’s always soothed his bruises and scrapes with a timid stroke of his fingertips. “Are you alright? What happened?”

“I’m fine.” The words come out rusty. She clears her throat and tears away her gaze to offer her son a reassuring smile. “I must have slipped on some ice.”

“A thousand apologies,” Baraz pacifies. “I fear we’ve caused quite a ruckus. Are you certain that you are unhurt? There is a healer among our number.” He signals at a man piling a set of bedrolls along the far wall.

“No,” Hilda interjects before the man has the chance to answer. “It’s nothing. I’m alright.”

Claude is still silent. It’s impossible to meet his eyes. She settles on his feet instead. There must be a reason why he isn’t speaking. She feels the hair on her nape stand on end. Is it danger? Disappointment? Dread? Baraz seems to sense it, too. He glances over at Claude with poorly-hidden confusion before spreading on another chintzy smile.

“Well, thank goodness for that,” Baraz says. “I promise that no greater misfortune will come at our expense, my lady.” He turns, hunching his shoulders to his ears as he waves at a woman at the outskirts of their circle. “Sanaz, please, the door. I think we’ve had enough of the draft.”

“ _Do it yourself_ ,” the woman snarks. Baraz gives her a belabored look. She shrugs and pulls off her cloak. The others follow suit, filling the barn ever more with color: green, scarlet, cerulean blue. Hilda’s eyes water. She hears Arvid gasp with excitement. It makes her heart beat faster. She wants to run. The barn is generously sized for her humble flock, but it’s not large enough to stop the walls from falling in on her.

“Gul, see to a fire, would you?” Baraz says to the man with the bedrolls. Gul is more obedient than the woman at the door. He nods, brushing his palms clean as he steps forward and flicks a strip of fire alight in the air with the swish of his pointer finger. The smell of black magic fills the room. Arvid yelps in surprise. Hilda’s grip digs into his shoulder.

It’s too much. She wants to scream, but the ember dancing between Gul’s fingertips has ripped the air from her lungs just as efficiently as the bucketfuls that had melted her armor in Derdriu.

She’s in a graveyard full of the dead.

“Put it out!” Claude roars. The mage startles in shock, clapping his hands together with a smack that echoes in the rafters. The full retinue hunches submissively at the sound of Claude’s sudden fury. It tugs Hilda upwards from her panic enough that she can catch some of her breath. The fright in Arvid’s eyes pushes the rest back into her lungs. She forces her fingers open from their white-knuckled grip against his bunched coat.

“I’m sorry,” she breathes. “I...”

Don’t be a fool, a stern voice deep inside her chides. _Think_. And the voice is right, of course. Common fire would fill the barn with smoke and suffocate man, woman, and wyvern alike. So too will the coming storm freeze them solid if they don’t warm themselves with magic. She can’t fit them all into her tiny house. She shouldn’t want to, these strangers, dressed in riches, led by a ghost.

“I... I’ll fetch you some water,” she manages tightly. “Please, do as you wish.”

“My lady,” Baraz starts. She ignores him and presses on. 

“Mum,” Arvid protests as she pushes him towards the door. She grits her teeth and musters more strength into her arm.

“Go.” She nearly chokes on her desperation to sweep him from the barn. She can’t leave him exposed to this strange, walking dream until she’s understood where it’s come from. With each minute she realizes more of its impossibility. She saw Byleth cut Claude apart. Watched as his lifeblood spilled across the uncaring stone of the city his family once built. She sees it everywhere, even now, so many years later: in the shadows at the corner of her eye at night; when she selects an old chicken from their coop and slits its throat to feed her son; when she dreams, sometimes.

So what is he doing in her barn?

“Go into the bedroom,” she orders Arvid as soon as they’ve made it through the snow piling across the yard and into the house’s threshold.

“What? Why?”

“Just do as you’re told,” she snaps. The boy’s stubborn frown melts away under her tone. “Now, Arvid.”

“Are we in trouble?”

Hilda’s chest pinches. “No.” She smooths a hand over his shoulder, guilt building in her stomach as she wonders if she’d bruised him before. “No. Of course not, darling. There’s no trouble. I’ll see to it.” She brushes him forward under her arm and plants a kiss against his brow. “Some things are better settled alone. Hm? Go. Take off your coat. Warm yourself up. I’ll find you when I’m done.”

“You promise?”

“Oh, Arvid. I promise.” She nudges him towards the crooked doorframe leading into her bedroom. “There’s nothing to be frightened of, sweet one. Go on.”

He doesn’t say it aloud, but she can see the way his clever mind is wondering just why she’d tell him not to be frightened, if there truly wasn’t something in the growing storm to fear. He listens to her all the same, boots scuffing as he trails into the bedroom. She closes the door behind him and sags all of her weight against it. The squat windows rattle from the wind. She glances at the flat slate headstone set in front of the hearth before looking finally to the front door. 

It opens. Swirls of fat snowflakes slip inside to disappear against the dark floor. Claude steps forward and closes the door against the storm. He’s left his cloak behind in the barn. The white flakes scattered across his shoulders make the gold of his clothes ever more blindingly saturated. He looks up from his bow against the weather and glances quickly across the room. Hilda’s breath catches in her throat when they find her and stop, utterly stilled.

He looks just like him, and nothing like him at all. The other men had said that he was a king in a language they’d thought she wouldn’t understand. The thick brocade of his long jacket— not a cape as she’d suspected from glimpses of it beneath his cloak, but rather a high-collared outer robe with the most beautiful embroidery she’s ever seen, hemmed with a dark, glossy fur down its open center hem; and below that, more richness, more gold, a sash in scarlet and smoky olive green —hints at the title. His posture demands it. She is reminded of Arvid’s favorite history books, all filled with terrible warrior-kings.

“...Hilda.”

She grits her teeth against the heat gathering in her eyes. “I knew an old, kind man, once,” she says around the knot in her throat. “A librarian. A monster. They said that he was killed, and that his killer took his face and wore it like a mask. Is that what you are?”

Claude flinches. “No,” he breathes. He steps forward once, twice, until there isn’t much left of the room between them. Hilda flattens against the door. “Hilda, if I would’ve known that you... I...” He tosses his head and swallows whatever it was he meant to say. She watches his throat bob, eyes lingering on the pale scar that travels down its middle like a river splitting a map. “If I had heard word of you, a rumor— gods, a _lie_ —I would’ve _found_ you.”

She isn’t certain if he’s offering her an apology or an explanation. Neither seems adequate to name the haunted look in his eyes. It lures her from the door. She walks a stilted pace forward. Claude stands his ground, but the grandness in his posture shrinks until he’s left looking mortal again.

“Are you — are you safe?” he continues, growing breathless as his words spill more quickly from his lips. “Here? Are you alone, is there—”

“I watched you die,” she croaks. Claude’s breath rasps short.

“No,” he answers quietly. “Nearly...But not enough.”

“I saw it,” Hilda insists with a sob. “All of it.”

The barrier between them breaks. Claude stumbles through it, scooping an arm around her shoulders to draw her tight against his chest. She can feel his heart hammering through all of his fine silk. There’s a strangeness in how he’s holding her. She reconciles it a moment later. The old, familiar sludge of her guilt stirs to life as she leans against his empty right sleeve. _I was supposed to protect you_ , she wants to weep into his collar.

He presses his cheek to the crown of her head before she has the chance. His fingers tremble at her nape. “You’re alive. Hilda. Gods. You’re alive.”


	3. The Summit

The trouble with time is that one can stop it, no matter how important they are. Hilda wishes that she could. A moment isn’t nearly enough to gather her scattered thoughts and line them up again. Questions, too, so many of them that she can barely catch her breath. But even as Claude slowly loosens his embrace, she knows that time is ticking forward at its usual breakneck pace. Arvid is undoubtedly only a few steps away. She knows that he must have his sharp, curious ear pressed against her bedroom door. She can see the dark smudge of one of Claude’s riders slowly stumbling across the yard. Everyone is coming for them, even after so many years.

“Hilda,” is all that Claude manages before the front door swings open with a white flash of swirling snow.

“Good— _hello_ ,” Baraz adjusts, gaze settling momentarily on the thin gap between them before lifting to rest more benignly on the hearth. “Pardon me. I was hoping to inquire if you might be in possession of a bucket, my good lady, with which we could gather some snow to melt for our mounts.”

“Yes. Of course.” She eases backwards with a reluctant step, smoothing her palms over her skirts to settle her mind on the moment at hand. She nearly breaks for the slanted stack of old buckets stored in the larder before she remembers Arvid. Another pass of her hands over her dress. Goddess. Has the wool in her bodice always been so coarse?

“Come on, then,” she says, sing-song, pulling open the door into her bedroom to unveil her son eavesdropping in exactly the spot she’d suspected. The broom he’s wielding is a surprise. She hears Baraz swallow something that sounds suspiciously similar to laughter. Arvid eyes the two men in the common room warily. He adjusts his grip on the broom handle.

“We’ve come to an agreement,” Hilda reassures him, taking the broom in hand as well.“Myself and our new friends. Nothing to worry about, just like I told you.”

Arvid frowns and stares hotly at Baraz. The man’s feigned formality falters slightly from the half-hidden smile twitching on his lips.

“What did you talk about?” Arvid challenges, unconvinced. Hilda sighs and tugs on the broom until he finally releases it.

“Dull things. Laws of quarter,” she answers, setting the broom aside before skirting sideways to hunt out the bucket for Baraz. Her mind spins as she struggles to fill the strange scene with babble. Claude watches silently, fingers fanned over his lips, eyes like saucers fixed unflinchingly on Arvid.

“ _What we have to give freely shall be given freely,_ ” Hilda remembers from some old book her mother must’ve bullied her into reading, once, “ _and what we must keep will be kept_. I’m afraid that’s most things,” she amends, swallowing a prickled sense of pride— and how many years has it been since she’s allowed herself the frivolity of pridefulness, after so many of them spent bathing in streams? —as she offers a bucket to Baraz. “We live simply here.”

“And we have much that can be given freely,” Baraz counters kindly. “As long as the snow is free for the taking, allow us to see to the rest. Just yesterday we felled an elk. It’s far too much meat for our humble party. We will see to our dinner. Allow us to prepare some for you as well, as a gesture of our appreciation for your hospitality. It shall make a fine enough roast.”

Like the rest of Baraz’s proposals, it doesn’t seem as though Hilda can disagree. No matter. If anything, it’s a relief that she won’t be forced to thin out what’s left of yesterday’s mutton stew to feed this _humble party_ that has so tidily doubled the village’s headcount.

“That seems like a fair trade,” she agrees. Baraz smiles and dips his head.

“And so it is agreed. Just a moment, then, and I shall summon our best to see to it —that is, if we may borrow your hearth?”

“Of course,” Hilda answers, nodding at the fire. “As long as you don’t put it out.”

Baraz laughs. It has an honest peal to it, unlike his voice when he speaks. 

“I’ll sleep in the snow myself if it comes to that,” he says. He dips his head neatly in Claude’s directly before stepping towards the door. Claude makes no motion to respond. The storm outside briefly fills the common room with its cold breath before Baraz swings the door shut again, leaving the trio to the crackle of the fire and the tinkle of the snow blown against the windows.

Arvid endures the silence for a handful of heartbeats until he can stand the novelty of a man— young, in comparison with his hoary neighbors, and well-dressed, dripping with the promise of faraway places—no longer. He turns on his heel to face Claude. It seems as though they are friends again.

“Are you a hunter?”

Claude’s brows raise in surprise. He drops the hand at his lips to prop against his hip. Hilda realizes that Arvid takes on the same pose when he’s amused, too. It makes her chest ache.

“Sometimes,” Claude says. Arvid sucks in a delighted breath.

“Did you really bring down an elk?”

Claude nods. “We did, although I didn’t have anything to do with it. But my friend Baraz there, he’s an excellent shot.”

“Where’d you find it?” Arvid balls his excitement into swinging fists at his sides. “Did it have horns? Sven says they don’t come up high like this, but I told him that I’ve seen them. We should show him! Did you keep the _skull_?” He says the word with the disgusted wonderment he reserves for other gruesome, boyish treasures. “We could give the bones to his dogs! Did you use a bow?”

Claude’s lips slip into a lopsided smile. “I’m not much of an archer,” he insists gently. “Are you?”

“Yeah!” Arvid darts forward to dig through his hoard of trinkets stored in a nearby crate. He unearths a short bow, pinching the string taut at either end as he jogs back to Claude’s side. “I keep the crows away from the garden. I got _two_ of them last summer. Here! Look!” He shoves the bow against Claude’s chest before darting back to the crate and returning with a fistful of black pinion feathers.

Claude inspects the bow with the turn of his hand while Arvid artfully displays each feather. Hilda watches how his eyes trace its curving lines. It’s unlike the bows they used as students at Garreg Mach, she knows: those had been utilitarian, as most Fodlan things tend to be, much like her motherland’s straightforward broadswords and plain-fashioned plate. Leave it to the Almyrans to add poetry to their weapons.

“Did you make this?” Claude asks Arvid, voice drawn tight.

“Uh-huh!” Arvid shoves the feathers into his pockets to take the bow back from him. He assumes a shooter’s pose, aiming an invisible arrow at the far corner with one eye closed, the pink tip of his tongue peeking through the corner of his lips. “Well, and Miss Hadiya helped. She showed me how to make it, but I did it all myself. Her father was an Almyran soldier.”

Claude glances in Hilda’s direction. She swallows against the knot in her throat and nods. “Hadiya is the village baker,” she explains. She rubs at her eyes with a quick flash of her sleeve, hoping that Arvid won’t see the tears that’ve gathered on her lashes. “She’s been like a mother to him.”

“Aw, Mum, _you’re_ my mother,” Arvid scoffs. Her chest heaves. A pained wrinkle folds between Claude’s brows as well, but he quickly smooths it.

“ _And did this Hadiya teach you to speak Almyran, too?_ ” he asks Arvid, slipping into the language with ease. Arvid beams.

“ _Yes! She says I speak it well._ ”

“ _You do,_ ” Claude agrees. “ _Better than me, I think._ ”

Arvid’s smile grows ever wider. “ _Mum helped some, too,_ ” he reveals conspiratorially, “ _but she always gets the words mixed up._ ”

“Alright, Arvid,” Hilda laughs, rubbing at her eyes again. Claude’s looking at her, equal parts confused and tortured. “We all learned it when we were young,” she tells him. The old pinch that comes with thinking about Holst leaves her lightheaded. “I should’ve paid better attention.”

“Now Miss Hadiya is showing me how to write. She says it’s in the proper way— no half measures,” Arvid mimics, tilting his head in the wry way Hadiya that does when she tutors him next to her toasty clay ovens. “So it’ll take awhile. She says that someday I’ll be a proper scholar, just like my father. He knew all sorts of things. Isn’t that right, Mum?”

Hilda presses against her lips with her fingertips until they lose their feeling. She nods stiffly. Arvid grins and gives his bow a final proud wag before he sets it aside, replacing it with a switch he uses to sword fight with his shadow in the yard.

“He could ride a wyvern _and_ shoot a bow. Miss Hadiya says that’s the way to be a good man: you have to be able to ride and shoot, but you need to know your letters, too. Say,” he adds, turning to Claude with the next surge of his endless, capricious energy, “what’s your name, sir? I’ll write it out for you!”

The door opens before Claude has the chance to answer. Baraz enters with a fresh gust of snow, followed after by a woman dressed in blue with a gory elk hock balanced over her right shoulder.

“ _I don’t understand why I have to cook it_ ,” she’s muttering bitterly.

“ _Better you than me. Don’t want to burn this poor woman’s house down._ ”

“ _So have Khalid do it._ ”

“ _You think he’d fare any better? Have you already forgotten about the hares?_ ” Baraz clears his throat and makes a show of knocking the snow from his boots before stepping deeper into the room, as if it will make any difference if it melts into the earthen floor closest to the hearth as opposed to the door. “My good lady,” he gracefully pivots, nodding first at Claude before bowing into a far more showy bend in Hilda’s direction. “May I introduce our chef for the evening: the esteemed Lady Sanaz.”

“ _Don’t call me that,_ ” Sanaz snaps. She doesn’t do anything about the snow on her own clothes. Instead she looks Hilda over from head to toe before doing the same to Arvid, who has become distracted by tracing circles into the floor with his switch. “Hello,” she adds, voice curt and halting in the way of someone less comfortable with speaking Fodlani than her more silver-tongued counterparts. She bounces her burdened shoulder. The elk hock glistens in the firelight. “For you.” 

Hilda isn’t certain how to respond. No matter how terrible this Sanaz may be at cooking, as her rushed introduction seems to have suggested, Hilda can’t be much better at it herself. Sanaz seems to come to this understanding on her own. She frowns and glares at Baraz.

“I will cook it,” she relents gloomily, turning to advance upon the hearth. “Do you have _... a spit, Dung-Beetle,_ ” she attempts, centering her ire on Baraz once more. “ _What is the word?_ ”

“Yes,” Hilda intervenes, dancing forward to unearth the object in question from a selection of crooked iron tools kept beside the hearth. “Here you are. Thank you very much. That looks delicious.”

“Hm,” says Sanaz as she accepts the spit. She eyes the hock for a moment before bracing it between her knees. The half-frozen meat cracks and splits as she spears it with slow, ferocious strikes. Baraz clears his throat.

“Let us leave her to it, then,” he attempts uneasily, waving them towards the table. It would be easier if it were a larger room. Even if they retreat to the piecemeal collection of chairs, they’ll only be three paces away from whatever brutality Sanaz is inflicting on their meal. Not for the first time, Hilda feels her cheeks burn from the shame of the simple life they’ve caught her living.

Arvid rescues the moment, as he always does. “Mister,” he gasps, suddenly at Baraz’s side as they take all four seats at the table, “I like your knife!”

Baraz grins and pulls the thing in question from his belt. It’s the most gaudy blade Hilda has ever seen. Arvid stares at it as if it’s made from all of the stars in the sky.

“What an eye you have, my boy! My father gave me this knife on the morning of my eighteenth birthday. It is my most prized possession in this entire world. Here. I’ll let you hold it, but you must be careful, hm? The edge is incredibly sharp.”

Arvid takes the dagger gingerly from him after looking first to Hilda for her reassuring nod. She isn’t sure why she gives it to him. Maybe its the wonderment in his eyes, glittering like wildfire as he carefully balances the blade across his palms. He takes it by the hilt next. Fat rubies and emeralds glimmer between his fingers. It seems to her that he finds it too easy to take in hand.

“Your father must’ve been a king!” Arvid gasps. “Are you one, too?”

Baraz’s lips twitch into an amused shape. He glances quickly at Claude before shaking his head. “Oh no, nothing like that,” he reassures Arvid, voice as smooth as olive oil.

“Are you a warrior, then?”

“He’s my brother,” Claude interjects. Baraz’s mask falters. He frowns, cocking a brow as he turns to look at Claude without any of the amusement from before. Hilda realizes that this was not part of whatever feign they’d planned to tell their humble hostess when they’d first arrived at her door. Claude ignores all of that. His gaze is on Hilda alone. It makes her feel as though she’s sitting naked in her chair.

“My sister, Sanaz.” He gestures across the table at the woman, who’s paused from scraping a stray square of hair from the hock to gawp at him with a more fiery version of Baraz’s bewilderment. “And this is Hilda,” he finishes, turning over his palm to signal finally in her direction.

Baraz’s breath whistles from his chest. He gapes at her with a shock-slacked stare before hiding it with the swipe of his hand, which lingers cupped over his lips as his gaze flicks between Hilda, and Claude, and Arvid, still distracted by the dagger.

“ _By the gods, Khalid,_ ” he manages finally. “ _So this is Hilda._ ”

* * *

Arvid is a predicament. Claude won’t stop looking at him like a drowning man staring at the shore, but he also hasn’t said a word about him since the boy had asked for his name. Baraz has noticed Claude’s apparent bewitchment, but seems so stupefied by Hilda’s identity— which she hadn’t, until that very moment, realized she’d been keeping hidden from him—that he hasn’t addressed it outright. 

But Hilda is clever. She understands the fundamentals of the tension that’s filled the room. Claude is a king. She may not know how he’s won his crown, but she’s certain that he won’t abandon it to join her in a mountaintop shanty town. He’s a Riegan, after all, and all Riegans are like moths to responsibility’s flame. And so Claude must understand his responsibility over this boy with his own green eyes, his nose, with the same tousled curl in his hair. Arvid has learned to live under a dead father’s legacy, but what would it mean for him to be abandoned by a living one?

They share a meal of charred elk paired with a thousand more questions posited by Arvid, politely answered by Baraz: the names of their wyverns, their favorite hunting game, the meaning of the shapes embroidered into their clothes, always carefully redirected once his questions start to drift towards where they’ve come from or where they’re headed next. There is no question that the trio crowding the opposite end of the table are siblings. Hilda would be charmed by the way that they communicate without speaking, all quick glances and drumming fingers against the tabletop, except for the fact that it makes Holst’s ghost so heavy in the air.

Their message lands. After the last of the elk has been sawed into smaller pieces and eaten, Baraz stands and makes an offer to show Arvid how to build his favorite rabbit snares. Sanaz promises to teach him a better version. Arvid leaps from the table to bring them a collection of kindling suited for the task, delighted by the prospect of their undivided attention. He doesn’t notice the way that Hilda stands, nor how Claude follows her without speaking into her bedroom.

She ushers Claude inside and closes the door. For a moment it seems impossible to turn and face him. She convinces herself that Arvid will be safe despite the walls between them— and knows it to be true, somehow, deeply, primally. She also knows that she has no choice but to speak frankly with Claude, now that the pretense of playing house has ended. But her legs are suddenly made of lead. As desperate as she is to stay in this room forever, so too does she want, more than anything, to run away.

Instead she finally turns, and finds Claude transfixed by the far wall, arm outstretched as he traces the scribbly drawings covering each inch of the lime-washed plaster with a reverent touch. They are a silly little treasure, as precious to Hilda as anything she’s ever owned: amorphous closest to the floor, their forms growing more recognizable as the colorful lines of chalk had risen along with Arvid’s height. Wyverns, spindly-legged dogs, curlicues and clouds; pink-haired figures made from four quick strokes smiling hand-in-hand with their counterparts smudged with charcoal curls.

“Arvid,” Claude tests quietly. “You named him after your uncle— the one who taught you how to ride?”

It feels like she’s got a fist crushing her heart into powder. Hilda scrubs at the fresh tears gathering in her eyes. “Uncle Arvid was always my favorite,” she admits. “I wasn’t— I didn’t know if there was a name that—that you—” her voice breaks. She fights against the tremble of her lips and loses. Goddess. After so many years of learning how to cope with all of this, how is it that none of that seems to matter now? “I didn’t want them to hurt him, so I didn’t...”

“It’s perfect,” Claude interrupts with the shake of his head. He falters, dragging his hand across his cheek until his fingertips rest against his lips. His eyes are dark. “He’s perfect.”

“He is.” Hilda braces herself with a shaky breath. She can’t keep dancing with him like this, not even if he means to chase around the truth until dawn, king be damned. “He’s your son.”

Claude flinches. “I know.”

He tilts away, gaze lifted to the ceiling. A wet line trails from the corner of his eye into the dark edge of his beard.

“As soon as I saw him I knew, somehow. In the middle of nothing for miles in every direction, dressed like a wolf cub, with a lamb at his side. I thought maybe I’d let myself grow too cold... that I’d finally lost my mind, you know?” He huffs an incredulous breath. “And then he greeted us in my father’s tongue, as bold as anything, and convinced Almyra’s meanest guard to shepherd a flock of sheep for him. Even now I have to wonder if all of this isn’t just some mad dream.”

Claude looks at her. She sees Arvid in him now more than ever: not in a mischievous grin or in the verdancy of his eyes, but how the wildest summer storms scare all of the courage from her son and leave him looking small and frightened. “Hilda,” he croaks. “I really thought I’d lost you.”

She rips herself from her own hesitation and stumbles into his embrace. They totter together, hands searching for long-healed wounds as they sink with a set of ungainly steps to a sprawl on the ground. Hilda pulls back enough to fit her palms against his chest. Twelve of his heartbeats convince her that he’s real. She feels along his collar next, and then his throat, her fingertips skimming along the soft seam of a scar she remembers as red and cruel; the wiry plushness of his short beard, his cheeks, his temples, his brow, his hair. His skin is warm. He smells like rich, rare things. 

“How did you live?” Claude winces at her question and leans into her touch. “How did you do it?”

He cups the back of her head, slowly palming over the braid wrapped around her crown with a tremoring touch. “I wanted to die. I remember it. Lying there in the plaza, listening as they burned your men,” he says, his voice tipping into a wicked, growling register before it unravels again. “Some foot soldier took my bow and the coins from my pocket. Looted me, like I was a corpse. I was, maybe. I don’t know. They left me there. I don’t know why. Cowards. Leaving our city to ruin. They never really wanted Leicester. It was only an inconvenience.”

Hilda smooths his furrowed brow with her fingertips. He continues, “Nader came at nightfall to collect our dead. My Crest kept me alive until he found me. He took me across the border, and then the fool came back here for vengeance and they killed him for it.”

Hilda knows this, of course. She remembers the rumors. Nader’s death had been a boon for the Empire. Leicester had always hated him. Edelgard had been cautious not to do the same with news about Judith’s death. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

He pulls her against him so tightly that it almost hurts. “They brought me pieces of your armor. It was like charcoal. If I’d known that you’d lived... Damn it.” She shivers from the heat of his breath on her ear. “Eight years. I should have come back. I should’ve found you. _Damn it_ , Hilda.”

She shakes her head against the crook of his throat. “They would’ve killed you. Fodlan has one master now. You know that Leicester only tolerates an emperor because they have no other option. They’d fight for a Riegan. They always will.”

“Is that why you’re here?”

“Yes.” She should look at him while she speaks, she thinks, but she can’t force herself away from the reassuring thrum of his heartbeat. He doesn’t seem to mind. His grip has loosened slightly. He smooths it in slow circles across the span of her shoulders. “No one knows who we are. Arvid is just a boy.”

“You’ve protected him,” Claude says. “From everything. For all these years.” The awed tone of his voice makes her suddenly furious. She tugs backwards from his embrace.

“I was supposed to protect you!” Her guilt stirs, no longer petted and sedated by Claude’s warm hand. “I was your shield!”

Something new flickers across Claude’s features. She recognizes it, somehow.

“I never wanted that,” he counters tightly. “You promised me that you’d retreat.”

She tosses her head. The motion spills new tears down her cheeks. “That isn’t fair. You couldn’t’ve thought that I’d really leave you behind.”

His face falls. She jolts in surprise when he suddenly dips forward to bow his head against her chest. It’s impossible not to comb her fingers through the back of his hair. If she stops touching him for too long, maybe he’ll disappear.

“I can’t stay here,” he says after a long while. Hilda swallows her breath. It’s not like she’d expected him to promise anything to the contrary, but she’d at least hoped he’d lie about it first. He sits up to catch her gaze. “As soon as the storm passes, I need to continue on to Enbarr.”

“To Enbarr?” Hilda echoes, lips pulling into a snarl. He threads his fingers through hers before she has the chance to untangle herself from their cross-legged huddle on the floor.

“Edelgard is hosting a summit. It’s not just some toothless manifesto. It could mean real change. But it’ll be seen as a slight if I arrive when it’s already half over. It’s my responsibility to see to it that our interests are met.”

She forces her lips into a grim line. “So you really are a king, then, are you?”

“Yes,” Claude answers with a rueful little laugh. “So it seems.”

“You trust Edelgard?”

“No.” He shakes his head. “But I trust that the Empire doesn’t want to go to war with Almyra. She has too much to gain in playing nice with us.” He pauses, studying her with a steady gaze as he tucks a strand of hair behind her ear.

“You told me, once,” he starts, quieter, without the confidence that had steeled his tone before, “that you could leave Leicester behind.”

“I did,” she answers, voice catching in her throat. 

“I’ll return here as soon as I’m able, the moment that the summit’s come to a close. A week, no more.” He toys with his next words. It seems as though he settles on being honest. “Come with me. Home.”

Hilda’s heart dances in her chest. She tries to calm it with a shaky breath. “And what will that make Arvid?”

“What do you mean?” It’s a foolish question. She knows Claude understands. His brows bunch tight, but he doesn’t look away. “I won’t lie to him, Hilda. Not if I have the choice.”

“Would you name him your heir?”

“You’re asking if I would call him my son,” Claude argues, strained.

Hilda grits her jaw. No half measures, she remembers Arvid promising only an hour prior. “Almyra isn’t the Roundtable.”

“And it isn’t Fodlan, either. Our kings are chosen, not born.”

“Like Riegans,” she counters dryly. As if any of them had ever been convinced that Leicester sovereignty wasn’t anything more than a hereditary title dressed up in the false pretenses of choice.

“He’ll earn it if he’s offered it, Hilda. Not because of his blood, but because you’ve raised him to be clever, and brave, and kind.”

“I’ve raised him to live a long life.”

“I know.” He traces his thumb over her wrist. It makes her shiver. “We aren’t at war anymore. I’ll do whatever I can to keep it that way. Maybe for a lifetime, even, maybe more. Until then... A week.” He finds one of the scars sneaking out from under her sleeve and soothes it with slow strokes that make her want to bury her face in his collar and sob. “A month. A year. However long it takes, I’ll wait for your answer. Please. Consider it.”

Mountain storms pass quickly. Hilda knows that the skies will be clear by dawn. What good is there in spoiling these last rare moments they have to share? Claude has said his piece. She doesn’t have an answer for him, not yet, not when she’s still not fully convinced he’s truly there at all. It’s a dangerous thing, in any case. Maybe nothing better than a barter with the devil to raise the dead.

She rests her head against his chest instead of speaking, and counts his heartbeats until the night ends.

* * *

Claude leaves for Enbarr with the dawn, but his siblings stay behind. Hilda learns this only moments before she’s dashed a chair over Baraz’s turned back when she finds him rummaging through her larder. 

“Peace!” he yelps as she slings her arms sideways at the last moment, sending the chair tumbling harmlessly to the ground. He’s grinning when he turns to her with his hands raised high and empty.

“What are you doing here?”

“Not thieving, I’ll promise you that.” He nods over her head at the window set in the far wall. “You should know that Sanaz is here as well, before you start looking for another chair. Grappling with that boy of yours.” He flicks his arm to shove down his sleeve over a purple bruise planted just below his wrist. “Strong lad. I see it runs in the family.”

Hilda frowns and turns to spot Arvid in the yard, just as Baraz had promised, hunched like a brawler as he circles a laughing Sanaz. His wyvern Azzi is nipping excitedly at their heels. She notes that Sanaz has abandoned her fine coat for shirtsleeves that do little to hide her warrior’s build.

“What are you doing here?” Hilda repeats stonily. She feels as though she barely knows Claude anymore— maybe she never really had. It makes no difference if these siblings are his. They’re no better than strangers, and uninvited, for that matter. Worse still that Baraz’s chintzy showmanship has gone. She’s never found it to be a good sign when liars stop bothering with lying.

“Khalid’s orders,” Baraz answers with a shrug.

“To do what?”

“To stay here until he returns,” he explains. “Without causing any trouble. He didn’t say that part out loud, but we’ll do it, too, you have my word.”

“That doesn’t mean anything to me.”

“It should.”

“I don’t know you,” Hilda insists through gritted teeth. She storms away from him before her temper catches up with her words. “I don’t want you here. I don’t want you near my son.”

“You’re putting me in a difficult position.”

“I don’t care.”

Hilda hunches against the windowsill and watches as Arvid slips between Sanaz’s slow-swinging arms and lands a victory strike on her unguarded side. His laughter peals across the hills. She tries to focus on it instead of her constant calculation of just how far Claude must have flown, now, so many hours after his daybreak departure. She imagines him in gold against the grey winter sky, as much a beacon as he’d once been on a white wyvern in Derdriu. Sanaz and Arvid reset themselves for another tumble. This time the woman feints a step right before darting leftwards to catch him with a careful twist of his arm.

A trap. Always. This world has always been a trap. Why would it change now? Eight years is nothing after a five year war that’d come only five years after the last: Brigid, Dagda, Leicester, nothing more than a spinning roulette, on and on and on. She’d touched Claude’s skin— warm, alive!—and then he’d gone again, back towards the woman who’d cut him apart for nothing, not a crown, nor glory, nor gold. Derdriu had been a footnote in her conquest of a continent which’d bowed while Hilda burned, while Judith fell, when Nader was cut down; when Holst had been torn from his horse and paraded as a warning for the men who might have fought for him if he hadn’t been left unburied in some distant, forgotten field.

“Hey.”

They’ll kill him. Of course they will. This is the work of conquerors. Everyone knows it. Fodlan, Almyra, they’re nothing more than a chessboard crowded with too many kings and queens. Hilda didn’t need three-quarters of an officer’s education to learn a lesson like that. She’d been bred for it, staring at the border with a bloody axe just like her forefathers before her, and she knows that even the hills won’t keep Arvid safe from what he’s been made to inherit, either. And what a fate it is: suffocation, fire, her heart crashing against her ribs so hard she’s sure they’ll crack and break apart. Dizzy, drunk-eyed, Goddess; one day she’s going to lose her mind. 

“Hilda.”

A pair of hands on her shoulders. She realizes too late that the strange, gasping rush in her ears is the sound of her own harried breathing.

“Come sit here,” Baraz says. The sardonic edge to his voice has gone. He speaks slowly and calmly. “There. Good. Put your heels flat against the ground. Excellent. You’re alright. Do me a favor, won’t you? I’ll count to ten, easy as you like, and you breathe along with each number. No cheating, hm? One number for each breath. Good. That’s right. One...”

The pinpricks start to wash from her veins. By _eight_ the white panic in her mind has faded into clearheaded dread. _Nine_ spills color back into the world. _Ten_ leaves her staring with blurry eyes at the muted brown in her sleeves.

“There you are,” Baraz says with a gentle pat against her arm. Hilda shakes away the shamed heat in her cheeks.

“...I’m sorry,” she manages hoarsely.

“Oh, no,” he replies with the quick wave of his hand. “Our secret.” He leans against the table. A thoughtful look fills his face for a moment before he nods in silent agreement and pulls a small flask from his chest pocket. “If we’re going to keep them, might as well add another,” he says with a wink as he screws open the top and takes a drag. He waves it at her afterwards. She frowns. 

“...It’s hardly noon.”

He shrugs.

“Aren’t you supposed to be some sort of guard?”

“Theoretically.” He takes another swig before offering the flask in her direction again. This time she takes it, although she doesn’t drink. It’s as gaudy as his dagger. “No one’s followed us here. There’s no one _to_ follow us, and there’s no one here, unless we count that shepherd of yours. He didn’t seem so daunting. Besides, I fight better drunk. Not that it’ll come to that.”

Hilda traces one of the flask’s filigrees with her fingertip. Arvid’s laughing again. She listens to him for a long while. “...How did you know to do that?”

“Hm?” Baraz looks back at her from his distracted stare into the window. “Drinking? Well, I think most of us come upon that sort of thing naturally. Sanaz says it has to do with overcompensation, but what does she know?” 

“Not that. The...counting.”

“Ah.” He gestures for the wasted flask, which Hilda hands back to him with a huff. He takes a shorter drag. “Well, that I _do_ come by honestly. It’s another secret, in fact. I think we’re owed some, stuck here waiting while the big people do their work.” He leans more heavily against the table and swirls the flask with the flick of his wrist. “I imagine that my brother hasn’t told you much about me, has he? Not now, or before, when you knew him better.”

Hilda shakes her head. He smirks. “Of course not. He’s always liked to keep things hidden, even with the people he shouldn’t. We don’t share a mother, you know. I suppose you’ve already guessed that. We’ve got about five years between us, so I remember him even when he was just a little babe. He was like a doll. Always happy, never cried. My father would carry him around like he was the finest treasure in all the world.” Baraz smiles, his gaze settling on something more distant than what’s outside the window. “I don’t know if it was because of his mother, or something he saw in him, or nothing at all— you know how parents are. They make their favorites, even if they say they don’t. Khalid’s the youngest. Maybe it’s that simple. Father finally stopped trying to make heirs, and looked down, and found one.”

“Not so easy a thing to admit when you’re one of the other ones, of course,” Baraz adds with a laugh. “I was my mother’s favorite, so I managed well enough. Sanaz doesn’t give a damn about anything, and we always share what we have— we were born together, you see —so we came to terms with it early, and both decided to love the little dastard, too. Unfortunately, we were the whole of his admirers. Our cousins hated him, the cretins. They were the least likely to inherit my father’s throne, so of course they were the vilest in fighting for it. And then he had two more brothers to contend with, neither one with any of my charm.”

Baraz takes another drink and savors it, glancing down as he runs his thumb over the mouth of the flask. “Our father was a very good king, but he was terrible at raising children. Khalid’s mother wasn’t any better. You’d think they would’ve learned, at least, if a simpleton like me could figure that sort of thing out. But that’s the way it was. Sanaz and I, we’d try our best to make him happy, but...it was a miserable time.”

“The worst came when he was about your son’s age. Our cousins gathered all their brains together and somehow managed to poison his food. Not all at once, but slowly, over the course of a few days, a week maybe, until he was so sickly he couldn’t stand from his bed. We all though he was going to die. I remember sitting with him and thinking that he was so small— that it should’ve been easier to keep him safe, you know?”

“And my father was inconsolable. He summoned every physician, every healer; witch doctors, conmen, all of them. When he learned that it was poison, I thought he might burn down the world. Somehow, someone convinced him to exile his brother and his brother’s sons, the whole rotten lot, once they’d traced it back to them. Not like they were clever enough to hide their tracks, especially not from a man like my father. There’s a lot of history in our family. It would’ve been war if he’d not sent them off, if he’d been given his way and hanged them.”

“Whatever was best, I don’t know, but in either case Khalid learned that his own flesh and blood had tried to kill him. He’d just turned nine years old. Thanks to the gods he recovered, but he stopped eating afterwards. He was so frightened of falling sick again. And every shadow, every loud noise, all of it terrified him.” Baraz shakes his head. “That’s when I learned my counting trick.”

Hilda wrestles with the enormity of what he’s told her. Claude’d never shared that he’d had siblings— hadn’t mentioned, at the very least, that they called him _Khalid_. Baraz reads her well.

“He copes by keeping secrets. I only know all of this because I knew him before he learned how. It’s not like I blame him. My father was even harder on him after the assassination attempt. I don’t even know if I disagree with the idea, really: look at everything that’s happened. But it would’ve been kinder if he’d shown Khalid some affection, too. My gods, they all hated him because Father loved him, and he didn’t even see it, you know? This crazy world of ours.”

He pauses and mulls over what he’s said. “...I don’t know. Maybe that’s what my father saw in him. He took on the lessons well. Learned how to protect himself. Got too clever for his own good. I’m not too proud to admit that I’ve always admired him. I’ve known from the start that the most I’d do in this life would be to help him make his own glory. But then he left.” He snorts. “Went west, to claim some tiny, backwater country that his mother had already left behind. I told myself that it was part of some grander scheme, but looking at it now... Hilda, he was young. We’d already crowned him in our minds, but he was only seventeen. Of course he thought he could conquer the world.”

He takes another drink. The flask must be getting light. “When I saw what they’d done to him,” he continues darkly, “what I’d let happen to him... It was the first time my father really listened to me. I told him that we needed to bring the west to its knees. Enough with pissing over the borderlands. Raze the continent, I said: from Nuvelle to the Throat. I saw it in him. He was ready for war. We would’ve won. No question. It would’ve been the horror I was so desperate for.” He drags a hand through his hair and turns to stare into the shadows of a far corner.

“Somehow Khalid convinced him to stand down. What I would give to have been in that room. It’s when my father stopped being king, really, and when Khalid started. My father named him as his vizier, and gave him time to heal, and we sent our soldiers home.”

Baraz fiddles distractedly with a trio of golden rings strung along the lobe of one of his ears. He spends a moment to consider something he leaves unspoken. He says instead, “...But my happy little brother was gone. It took me years to convince him to tell me what’d happened, what’d taken that from him. I knew it wasn’t the arm. That made it more difficult for him at first, the way Almyra is, of course, but they would’ve called him something worse if they hadn’t named him a cripple. And Nader... We’d all loved Nader. That was part of it, but not enough, I thought.”

He looks at her. His eyes are the color of amber. She sees parts of Claude in him that she’d missed before: the shape of his mouth, the angle of his jaw. It doesn’t seem so strange to share a table with him, anymore.

“It took him four years to tell me about Derdriu. And only when I’d worn him down enough to get him drunk. Not so easy a trick.” He smiles mirthlessly. “He told me about a woman who should’ve been his enemy, the way things are in our world. Instead she was his friend. Asked for nothing from him. Helped him. This boy whose own brothers wished him dead. He told me that she was beautiful, and fearsome, but only when given no other choice. How like him, I thought, to want for a warrior who was loathe to fight. And my brother can be so old-fashioned, you know. He wouldn’t tell me if he’d charmed her.”

His smile fades. She can feel the weight of his gaze on her shoulders. “But he told me how she died. That’s when I understood.”

Sanaz and Arvid have finished with their play-fighting. They’ve found a dry spot in the yard to sit, passing a skin of water between them as they discuss something that Hilda can only hear in sounds, not words. Arvid grins and giggles, bowing under her hand as she reaches forward to tousle his hair.

“I feel like you’re asking me a question,” she manages finally, gaze still settled on her son. She hears the table creak as Baraz shifts against his elbows.

“Ah, there is a question in there, somewhere, isn’t there?” He sighs. The gravity of what he’s said settles slightly as he empties his lungs. “Maybe if my brother was a different sort of man. But then I suppose I wouldn’t be here, on this cold, miserable mountain, and you wouldn’t have given him a son.”

Hilda should scoff and tell him that he’s wrong. Maybe he’s drunk enough to be convinced. They’ve all changed, in any case. She hasn’t been called a Goneril in years. It seems as if it’s the sort of thing that might be lost, once it’s forgotten. But she doesn’t, and maybe that’s an answer, too, to this question he hasn’t asked her.

* * *

As it so happens, Baraz is a better farmer than Hilda. He wakes before the sun and has the barn mucked and covered in fresh hay by dawn. The goats are wary of him, but somehow he wins the chickens’ favor without much trouble at all. Sanaz cooks them eggs over the hearth each morning. She’s better with breakfast than she is with supper. It’s a funny thing, the way the hills turn princes and duchesses into people. 

Hilda pretends that nothing’s changed. She spends the extra time earned by Baraz’s newfound passion for homesteading on trips made to Hadiya’s bakery. Old, borrowed odds and ends join her in her journey. She tells herself that it’s as good a time as any to return what the woman’s lended her, year after year. Hadiya greets her on the fourth day with a steaming loaf of bread baked into the shape of a woven wreath.

“You’ve been a good friend to me,” Hadiya says. “Give that sweet boy of yours my love.” It isn’t until Baraz explains that the loaf is a symbol of a traveler’s good fortune that she understands what she’s meant. Hilda invites Sven over for dinner that night and feeds them each a slice. Maybe that will ruin the omen, she thinks: they can’t all be travelers.

Seven days pass. The eighth makes it more obvious that she’s been a fool. It’s a miracle that Claude’s alive, of course. Maybe she won’t dream about him dying anymore, now that she’s been blessed to see him living. But she isn’t a queen. She’s couldn’t handle keeping house in the Locket as a part-time duchess. And perhaps one day Arvid will want to travel east. It’s not like she’ll stop him. He can enjoy everything his fatherland has to offer him without sacrificing his future to serve its throne.

Yes. Day nine, and she’s convinced. Life is not a fairy tale. The best lives are those lived and easily forgotten: not hidden princes, but happy farmers with full bellies and humble beds. She repeats the idea as she tucks herself into her bed. Her mind wanders in the dark, but it’s becoming easier to center. She pictures the weave of Hadiya’s loaf. Imagines what it would feel like to plait the dough. The steady rhythm calms her heartbeat. She’s nearly fallen asleep when she hears the first set of wingbeats drumming in the night air.

She’s on her feet before she can fight it. Swallows her nerves and pulls on a coat. By some stroke of luck the commotion outside doesn’t wake Arvid. She minces quietly across the common room, stopping only at the sight of a quiver laid three-quarters finished on the table. Sanaz had spent all afternoon teaching her son the basics of making the thing, which he’d pieced together with pieces of leather poached from the sacrifice of one of her saddlebags. Hilda can hear the echo of his pleased hums even in the snuffle of his snores drifting from the loft overhead. It makes her wonder just what she’s traded for this quiet life they’ve lived.

She forces herself forward towards the door. Baraz and Sanaz are there to greet her in the yard, busy with all of the little tasks that come with settling a wyvern after a long flight. The same scene is playing out across the full width of Hilda’s homestead. Claude’s entourage seems much larger when it’s not huddled against a howling storm.

Claude slides neatly from his saddle— gold, all of it, from his riding dress to his wyvern itself, as if he’s some sort of sun god grounded by the night —and freezes when he spots her. His hair is messy from what must’ve been a wild flight. The bustle of the men around him hushes when they spot her at her door. They part like a wave under an unspoken order to disappear into the barn. It’s only then that she sees them for what they truly are: quick, quiet, loyal. A dangerous combination when paired with all of the glittering swords at their hips and slender bows strapped to their shoulders.

What she intends to do is greet Claude with some portion of the formality he deserves, and then offer him something to drink while she learns more of what has happened in his trip into a lion’s den. But he looks at her the way he had when they were younger, once his men have disappeared. It sets her spinning until she realizes that she’s run gracelessly to him and thrown her arms around his shoulders. He’s already held her tight before she can stop herself.

“You’re late,” she sputters, which is exactly what she hadn’t wanted to admit aloud. “Are you hurt?”

“No,” he replies. He repeats it for good measure when he pulls back just enough to catch her eye. His cheeks and the tip of his nose are flushed by the cold. She fights the urge to warm them. “They were only peace talks. Overdrawn, but worth every extra minute. The Empire will be a friend to Almyra. They’ll grow rich enough from it to want to guard that friendship for a hundred years. Two hundred,” he adds when the giddiness from his victory catches up with him. It fades just as quickly into something more bittersweet. His hand hovers tentatively in the space between them. He draws his thumb over her temple once she makes it clear she won’t shrug him off. 

“I’ve missed you.” His jaw tenses. “I’ve always missed you,” he amends, voice tamping into a whisper stripped of all its pride, “but more now than ever, somehow.”

Her eyes water. She’s so damned tired of crying.

“You should’ve told me your name was Khalid,” she manages through the tangle in her throat. He laughs in surprise, although it sounds suspiciously like a sob.

“I should’ve,” he agrees. “You can call me whatever you like.”

For some reason the strange offer breaks the dam inside her chest. A thousand thoughts rush like whitewater to escape her lips. _I’ve been so alone_ , a pitiful part of her aches to admit. A more bitter shade simmers over his decision to turn his back on Fodlan for so long. Then guilt, both old and new, some of it woven into the prospect of being welcomed onto Almyran soil when so much of its blood has been spilled by Goneril axes (and there, a little girl’s voice tossed in with all the rest, whimpering _help me, I can’t find Holst_ ).

Arvid, smiling, proud, writing his father’s name, surrounded by his family. 

“Let us go with you.”

It’s indelicate. Unearned. Maybe she should’ve bargained something from him in exchange for what she’s given him. But she’s always loved him, and she’s never told him, and although her house is built high on a hill, she’s never been naive enough to think that it’s more than a different sort of cage.

“Of course,” he breathes. His hand slips to cup the nape of her neck. For a moment it seems as though he means to kiss her, but he loses his nerve, pressing his lips to her brow instead as he draws her closer. “Please. Of course you can. Hilda. Of course. Of course.” 


	4. The Oasis

Khalid and Hilda spend the night sitting on the balding rug spread at her bedside, backs against the bed frame as they share eight years of stolen time. First comes stories about Arvid, both monumental and trivial: the date of his birth, his first word (moon), his favorite foods (Hadiya’s rye bread, hot from the oven, smeared with fresh butter from Harald and Inge’s cows; and caramel, enjoyed only once, when a far-ranging merchant had come with sugar, and Hilda somehow managed not to burn it over the kitchen fire); his natural skill with a bow, as if his looks hadn’t been enough to confirm his father’s blood; his fear of thunder, and how he’d struggled with the hint of a stutter as a babe until he’d said his first words in Almyran, and his tongue had learned how to roll the language’s acrobatic sounds.

Hilda tells him about the first manifestation of his Crest, when Harald’s old bull had freed itself from its pen and nearly run them both down. How lucky they’d been, she says, to have been alone— and that she’d once seen Felix Fraldarius’ major Crest activate in an afternoon spent hiding from her classwork in the training grounds, for otherwise the blinding flash would’ve terrified her nearly as much as it would’ve stupefied the villagers, so unlike the calm glow of her own minor variation. Thank the Goddess that Arvid had only stunned the creature. There would’ve been no easy explanation for how a six year old armed with a tree branch could’ve killed a bull.

She tells him how she’s spent each afternoon watching the horizon for red liveried troops to ride upon them and snuff out the last vestige of Leicester’s sovereignty. Khalid takes her hand in his at that, and runs his thumb over her knuckles’ uneven ridge. 

“Almyra has always had a problem with spies,” he says. She’s not sure what he means, but it’s a relief to take a pause from her long monologue. Her gaze lingers on his downcast lashes, and on the first hint of a crease at the corners of his eyes.

“The border helps,” he continues. “My father made sure that it was impassable after Nader brought me home. Kept things quiet... I think that you were right to hide yourself here, Hilda. Edelgard’s dear professor wanted me dead. He would’ve finished the task if he’d been given the chance. Honestly, I can’t say that I would’ve done it any differently, if I’d found myself as the Emperor’s advisor. So I crawled back home after Derdriu, and hid there, like a coward.” He leans his head against the side of the mattress, gaze lifted listlessly towards the ceiling. “Licked my wounds for a long time. Everything changed. I couldn’t fight.”

He shrugs his far shoulder. Hilda’s heart flips in her chest as she remembers the strange emptiness at his side when he’d embraced her; and worse, the terror she’d felt when she’d watched Byleth’s horrid sword slice into that same shoulder and cleave away Khalid’s arm with the indifference of a hunter portioning his kill. Even in the short time that they’ve been reunited, she’s seen the way that he hides behind the bulk of his clothes. She wonders if he’s noticed the way that she does, too.

If he has, he doesn’t address it, but instead admits, “I should’ve never fought. That’s the lesson I learned— too late, at too high a cost, but there it is. I’ve listened to it. Every step I’ve taken has been to stop this godsdamned fighting. When my father started to fade, and it became clear that he’d not be king for much longer, I told his men to reopen the border. It didn’t take long for Edelgard’s little birds to roost around the palace. I made certain that they saw the fruits of my father’s work.”

“He brought Almyra together,” he says.“All of its wealth, all of its power. I was a fool to think that what I attempted to do in Leicester was anything like what he’d done.” He shakes his head. A distant look dulls his eyes. “So I let them see it: everything that Almyra is. Who I am. Edelgard was clever enough to pretend to be surprised, in Enbarr, during the summit, but she’s known, just as I’ve known. For two years, nearly.”

“A long time,” he sighs. “Two years, eight years, but not enough.” He closes his hand around hers and squeezes. “I don’t know what this is, Hilda. Fate. Luck. Pity, from the gods. Whatever it may be, I...If I hadn’t come here, if I hadn’t found you, alive... I saw them, of course. Edelgard’s dogs. Hubert sat at her right hand. If I hadn’t known that you’d survived him, I...I think I would’ve killed him.” He huffs a sad sound. “Or I would’ve tried, and failed, and maybe then Byleth would’ve ended what he started. And then Almyra would’ve gone to war. Everything for nothing.”

“But you didn’t kill him,” Hilda attempts. It’s not a question as much as it is a desperate attempt to chase away the awful, tortured tone of his voice. Khalid winces and shakes his head.

“No. I didn’t kill him. I greeted him as an ally. Ate with him. Reasoned with him. As if the past hadn’t happened at all.”

“And you got what you wanted?”

“Hah,” he breathes. “I did. That, and more. It’s expensive to rebuild a continent. Edelgard’s got three times the dukes and barons to manage than she’s had before, and she wants to neuter them. It’s brilliant, really. She’s got her men building schools, and hospitals, and court houses, even, all on requisitioned soil. I don’t know if the people love her, but they respect her for what she’s done for them. She’s determined to give them what she’s promised. She can’t do any of that without powerful allies.”

She realizes that he’s gripping her hand too tightly at the same moment that he does. He releases it and skims his fingertips apologetically along the wrist of her sleeve.

“I suppose that’s what it is to win a war,” he says, eyes hooded by his dark lashes once more. “Making friends with the people you’ve beaten and buried.”

“They didn’t bury us.”

Her reassurance is more for herself than for him. Brittle defiance is all she has left. The circumstances are too overwhelming, otherwise: visions of Hubert, still stinking of the magic that’d reduced Goneril’s bravest men into cinders, bowing before Khalid in all of his golden finery; the simple truth that Edelgard has been good, and generous, and merciful following the last days of her bloody war; this small, windswept house, filled with ugly, handmade things and unfinished floors.

Khalid inhales sharply. “No,” he agrees. “They damn well didn’t.”

“I’ll tell Arvid tomorrow. Alone, I think, at first, so that he can ask questions.” Each word she speaks emboldens her. That’s right. They didn’t bury them. Holst, Nader, Judith, maybe, but not them, the ones left to live— and to do better, even, maybe, beyond the pittance of survival. “I want to share what I have with the people here, and do it right. It’ll take me a few days before I’m ready to leave.”

Khalid nods. “That’s good. Whatever you need.” The confidence is quickly sapped from his assertion. He peeks at her from the corner of his eye. “Will he be alright? Do you think it will upset him?” 

“Of course not,” Hilda scoffs. “He’s already turned your sister into his personal attendant. He comes by all of that honestly. Besides, there’s nothing that Arvid loves more than adventure. It’s hard enough to keep him from running off as it is. Once he took our poor old mare and rode her all the way out to the plains.” They both laugh. Hilda’s throat tightens and cuts her laughter short. 

“And it’s been difficult for him,” she decides to admit. Khalid stiffens at her side. “Every little boy wants a father.”

“Tomorrow,” he says quietly.

She hears what he’s left unspoken. Tomorrow it’ll be easier. Tomorrow they can move on. The dawn has already started to warm the dark skies outside her window. She watches as the navy clouds turn golden. The rising sun does the same to the old hurt inside her.

* * *

“You lied to me,” Arvid sniffles. He stands from his chair and staggers away from the kitchen table. 

“Arvid—”

“You _lied!_ ”

He lurches for his fuzzy cloak hung at the door. Hilda leaps to her feet, but she’s not quite certain just what it is she means to do. The morning has not gone as planned, despite all good intentions. She’d even tested what she’d say with Khalid before she’d recited it to Arvid in the privacy of their empty kitchen. And Khalid is a genius, or at least the closest thing to it that she’s ever met. So what the hell is she supposed to do now?

“Go away!” Arvid snaps as he storms through the door. She chases after him, hugging her arms against the chill as she watches him dash across the yard. “Leave me alone!”

“Arvid!”

Azzi chirps and swoops after his young master from his perch on the barn roof. Stirred by the commotion, Khalid and his siblings peek out from the doors below. Hilda catches his gaze before she turns to watch Arvid pick his way across the road.

“What’s happened?” Khalid asks, brushing his fingers clean of the leather polish he must’ve smeared at Arvid’s shouting. He’s dressed in what appears to be his most underwhelming attire, perhaps finally aware of how stark all of his gold looks against so much dirt. It’s a failed effort. His cloak— the dark thing he’d worn during his snowy arrival, now streaked with oily fingerprints across the breast —is simple but, unfastened as he wears it, it does little to hide the intricate crimson pinstripe which patterns his tunic beneath. As he jogs closer to her side she realizes that the stitch is made in the shape of tiny leaves sewn so convincingly that she nearly expects them to bloom.

“Oh, he’s... it was a lot of information to process,” she answers, exasperated. “Come on. I know where he’s going.” She rubs as much heat as she can into her arms. Khalid catches her at the elbow before she dashes off.

“It’s freezing, Hilda.”

He beckons Baraz and Sanaz with the flick of two fingers before reaching for his collar to shrug off his cloak. It’s draped over her shoulders before she can protest. In the time that it takes Baraz to give him his cloak as a replacement, she spots the neat fold of Khalid’s right sleeve, tacked upwards into itself four fingers’ distance from his shoulder. She looks away before he catches her staring. It’s easier to focus on the warmth trapped in his cloak, even if it feels as though the punch to her gut from Arvid’s betrayed departure has quadrupled.

“Come on, then. Just mind the road. It’s icy even when there isn’t snow.”

“What did you say to him?”

“Exactly what I told you,” she replies tightly. They pass through the gate with quick strides. “You said that it sounded right.”

“I thought it was fine.”

“Well, apparently not.” She glances over her shoulder and nearly stumbles when she realizes that they’re not alone. “We don’t need a parade, Khalid!”

He looks back to watch as his dark-garbed entourage files neatly from the gate. Most of them pause when he waves them off, but Baraz (newly dressed in a cloak that has apparently been taken from the unluckiest of them, trailing at the end in shirtsleeves) merely shrugs his shoulders and carries on. Khalid huffs and glances over at her guiltily.

“Damn it,” she grumbles. In all of their rehearsal earlier that morning, they hadn’t touched on the simple fact that Khalid isn’t a duke in the continent’s poorest country any longer. She might’ve underestimated a few aspects of his kingship. “Is it always going to be like this?”

Khalid laughs. “Worse,” he admits. They mince more carefully down the road as it slants into the village center. Hilda keeps her eyes on Arvid’s hunched shoulders.

Khalid is looking at her. He should be making sure that he doesn’t trip and break his neck from the pebbles they’re kicking out from underfoot. Not even his unshakeable chaperones will be able to protect him from that. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” he replies. “...Just that it’s the first time you’ve called me by my name like that.”

Her cheeks burn. They shouldn’t. There’s more important things to worry about: namely, if her son is going to denounce her if she carries on with their plan.

“You told me that I should tell him everything,” she insists.

He sighs. “We have to tell him everything. It’ll be obvious soon enough.”

Hilda frowns and focuses on managing the overlong hem of her cloak as they maneuver a set of steps carved into the muddy hillside. She can already smell the bakery. The familiar nuttiness makes her sad. Surely there are plenty of bakeries in Almyra— with the same clay ovens, even, filled with the same breads that Hadiya lovingly bakes —but none will be like the small, slant-roofed building peeking from behind the hills they’re carefully descending.

The bakery has been her sole lifeline to the world outside of the hinterlands. In the same way that Hadiya’s stories about her life as a far-traveling nomad have filled Arvid with wonder, so too have they been a way for Hilda to keep her memories alive. It’s no wonder that Arvid’s run to her when faced with the reality of leaving it all behind. Hilda is suddenly overwhelmed by how simple it all is, really; and precious, and soon to be lost.

The door into the bakery swings open. Hilda and Khalid stop just beyond the low stone wall that marks the road from the makeshift square at the village’s heart. They can hear the murmur of Arvid’s voice as he speaks to Hadiya with quick, waving sweeps of his arms. She props her hands at her hips and listens intently. In the middle of his report she glances in their direction. Hilda watches as her head cocks to the side. A smile briefly dimples her cheeks, but it disappears with a solemn nod as she focuses on Arvid again.

He finishes with a wide-fingered gesture and waits for her appraisal. She nods again and sweeps a hand over his shoulder to usher him inside. As Arvid enters, she signals at Hilda and Khalid with her pointer finger: _wait and see_. The door closes. Azzi huffs and paces across the threshold twice before stalking leftwards to curl into a coil in a sunny spot in the yard. Hilda waits a few beats longer before slowly leading Khalid forward. They perch themselves atop the wall closest to the bakery, near enough to hear Hadiya when she beckons for them, but still far enough away that Arvid won’t be able to spot them from the narrow windows. Baraz and Sanaz trail after them at a languid pace, heads bowed together as they bicker over something in a quiet, lazy tone.

Hilda realizes— suddenly gut-wrenchingly —that she’s just spoiled an eight year secret. Her fingertips tingle. She peeks sideways at Khalid.

“Hadiya is harmless,” she assures him. He looks at her but doesn’t answer. “She’s... She’s from Almyra.”

An embarrassed chill sinks down her spine. She’s always known the basics of Almyra, both its history and its language, but she’s never had her son’s insatiable curiosity. It would’ve served her well. Maybe Hadiya is harmless because she’s Khalid’s countrywoman, or maybe it’s the opposite. After all, Fodlan has certainly had its fair share of civil wars. Why wouldn’t Almyra? And to be honest, she’d lost her nerve when speaking with Arvid that morning, telling him that his father was _very important_ without admitting just how important _important_ was. What if nomads in Almyra are nomads because when they aren’t wandering they’re busy killing very important men? Goddess, what if—

“Does she have children?”

It’s not the political question she was expecting. The noise in Hilda’s head quiets slightly as she considers her answer.

“No. But she... _cares_ ,” she says, realizing just how absurd her wild daydreams about assassins are as she thinks more clearly about the woman in question. “About everyone. Friends. Strangers. She takes care of all of them. She came to be here in the hills because she found an old drunkard, once, when she was traveling— half dead, blind. The meanest bastard you’ll ever meet. She fixed him up and stuck around to care for him, because no one else ever would. Since then she’s become a midwife, and a baker, and a judge...And a teacher, even.”

Khalid nods. “Arvid’s been lucky to have her around.”

“So am I.” She wags her head. “Goddess. My mother had two children, but she was awful at it.” An old pinch adds to the weight in her chest. Maybe what she’s said isn’t entirely fair. “Not on purpose,” she amends more softly. “She was sickly. We only made it worse.”

Khalid’s brows raise slightly. “I didn’t know,” he replies. She’s not surprised. The men have always been infamous in her family. Not so much their counterparts. 

“She had a very formidable dowry, though.” She picks at the cuticle of her left thumb, mind wandering to the stories Baraz had told her about Khalid’s own grim childhood. “Maybe if we’d had mothers like Hadiya, we would’ve done this more properly.”

Khalid laughs. He plants his arm against the wall and leans against it, staring into the blue of the sky. “Yes,” he agrees, smiling crookedly. “Most likely.”

“...What will it be like? Where will we go?”

He considers her question with the slight bob of his head. “It won’t be anything like this,” he admits. “We’ll go to Myr. The capital.”

“I know what the capital is,” Hilda mutters defensively. He laughs.

“It’s beautiful, but it’s like any other capital: noisy. Crowded. They’ll want fanfare for all of this, but I can convince them not to. The palace is quieter, at least. Arvid can get his bearings there.”

 _So can you_ , he leaves unsaid, but she decides not to focus on it.

His face brightens with an idea. He catches her gaze. “Baraz’s boys will help him. They’re about his age.”

Hilda turns to seek out the named man with an incredulous stare. Baraz has found one of Arne’s copper stills. He’s inspecting it like a curator over a collection of fine art. Sanaz watches him a few paces away, already frowning and shaking her head.

“Baraz has children?”

“Four,” Khalid replies, grinning at her tone. “Reza is the oldest. Thirteen. Arvid will love him. He’s the bet shot I’ve ever seen. Scary, really. Ehsan is ten. He’ll be jealous to have another boy in the court, but he’ll come around. And Giv is... six,” he counts, fingers twitching against the wall as he keeps track of what he’s said. “He’s just had a little girl, too, finally. Sara.”

Each name he gives her seems more impossible than the last. One child, maybe— they’re all at that age, anymore —but _four_ makes Baraz a _family man_. “He’s married?”

“Er,” Khalid says, grin growing more crooked. “No. He’s... _impulsive_.” He laughs at the look she gives him. It teases her into laughing, too, if perhaps more dryly.

“But he’s a good father,” he continues. He combs his hand through his hair and scratches idly at his beard. “Better than my father was. Baraz has always had that in him.”

She nods and stares at her fingers clasped neatly in her lap. All at once it dawns at her: Arvid doesn’t only have a father, and an uncle, and an aunt. He has cousins. More than four, even, most likely, although if Baraz’s stories hold any water, Khalid’s other brothers will likely be less doting. 

“Lady Tiana,” she realizes aloud. “Is she there, too?”

“Oh, of course, the esteemed dowager _is_ the capital.” Khalid’s grin softens into a smile. “She’ll adore him. No matter what.” 

The door into the bakery swings open before Hilda has the chance to reply. They both stand. Hadiya nods at them and waves them closer.

“Come in, come in,” she chides them sweetly, all knowing smiles and sparkling eyes. “ _Ach_ , you’ll freeze out there.”

They shuffle into the bakery. Arvid is seated at the huge, flour-dusted table, his arms crossed as he makes a show of not looking at them while Hadiya steers them to a set of chairs on the other side. As always, the smell of baking bread is in the air. Hilda breathes it into her lungs, more for courage than anything, if she’s being honest with herself.

“There,” Hadiya says, pleased. She plucks a teapot hung near the mouth of one of her ovens and sets it between them before assigning each a short earthenware cup. Hilda watches as she takes stock of Khalid while she pours tea for all four cups, never staring too openly, in the clever way that she does most everything.

“Now. Young Arvid has come to me, and told me a great deal of things. And I’ve told him that the way we deal with matters like these is by drinking tea, and asking questions, and listening to one another. Hm?” She looks at Arvid. He peeks at her from the corner of his eye before sinking deeper into his chair with a huff. It doesn’t seem to deter her. She takes her seat and smooths the wrinkles in her apron. 

“So, I would like to ask you some questions. Perhaps after you’ve answered them, you’ll have a few of your own to ask as well.”

Khalid and Hilda both nod at her like students chided for missing their lessons. She smiles, wide and generous, just like the soft pillows of her arms.

“You are Arvid’s father?”

Khalid’s lips twitch ever so slightly. Hilda wonders if it’s from the surprise of such a bald question, or from the novelty of the question itself. Whatever it is, he collects himself and nods.

“I am.”

“And are you a good and honest man?”

“I...” He glances quickly at Arvid, likely wondering if he’s supposed to answer her frankly, or say something better tailored to an eight year old ear. “I try to be. I don’t know if that’s a question a man is meant to answer for himself.”

Hadiya smiles. It’s apparently the right response. She nods and gestures at the tabletop.

“Please. Have some tea.” 

They reach forward in unison. The tea is floral and fragrant. Hilda recognizes the herbs that she and Hadiya had picked together just before the weather turned. She takes a careful sip, all the while peeking through the steam to watch as Arvid stares glumly at his own untouched cup.

“And you, Hilda,” Hadiya continues after she’s set her cup neatly aside. “Do you find him to be a good and honest man?”

“I do.” It makes her embarrassed. She’s not certain why.

Hadiya nods. “I see. And yet what we have to discuss deals with dishonesty, is that right?” She looks to Arvid. His lips pucker into a pout. It apparently serves as confirmation of her claim. “What do you have to say about that?”

Hilda frowns. “It wasn’t a lie... Arvid,” she says, turning from Hadiya to face her son directly. “There’re things I didn’t know, and things I couldn’t tell you, but none of it was ever a lie.”

“Perhaps if you explain how these things came to be as they are,” Hadiya suggests sagely. She takes another sip of her tea. Hilda fights the urge to huff in frustration. Khalid shares her gaze for a moment, but even his clever green eyes seem perplexed by the situation. How can she possibly turn years of smoke and bloodshed into a story for a little boy?

“I... I used to live in another place, Arvid. And this place here, our home, even, was different once. You remember, from your books. There was a country called Leicester.”

He doesn’t answer her insinuation, but it doesn’t matter. They’ve read the old history books she’d stolen from Enbarr a dozen times. The old, dusty things are so obtusely academic that Hilda had been able to take some liberty with them, as to teach Arvid the basics of their world without revealing that many of the chapters were about his own forefathers’ great triumphs and terrible mistakes.

“Leicester wasn’t very large compared to other countries, but it still included many different sorts of cities and villages. Villages like this one, and grand ones, too. I was born in a place called the Throat. They also called it Goneril. I was— that is to say, I am...”

An unexpected heat gathers in her eyes. What can she say about Goneril? It’s impossible to tell stories about her family without tall tales about Holst. How much easier all of this would be if he was there to tell them himself. How much easier it would be if she hadn’t been the last of all of them.

“The Gonerils lived in Goneril,” she manages, clearing her throat. “I was one. That means that you are, too, little cub. There were other families just like ours, who lived in their own lands, just like the families here. Some of them were very close, and some of them were like Arne, bickering with everyone just because they liked to bicker, and didn’t know how to do anything else.” Comparing the old drunkard with House Gloucester helps to sweep away some of her nerves, at least. She gives Arvid a shaky smile. “But they all worked together to take care of Leicester.”

“Our family,” she continues, after pausing to see if Arvid will finally match her gaze. He doesn’t, but she’s faced worse trials than this before, and so she carries on: “They’d always had a great friendship with another one of these families in particular, called the Riegans. But the Riegans were different from the Gonerils, because the heir of their family was born in Almyra.”

That catches Arvid’s attention. He peeks upwards from the tabletop. Hilda watches the green blur of his eyes as he quickly glances between the two of them before looking away again. Her chest swells with pride. He’s always been so clever.

“That heir was Khalid,” she says, and pauses, because she’s not certain if Khalid von Riegan is the right combination of names, or what the other options would be, even; Goddess, she should’ve paid better attention when Holst taught her about their neighbors. “Your father.”

Arvid risks a look at Khalid through his curly fringe. Khalid stiffens slightly at her side. She wants to take him by the hand, the way that he had hers the night before, but she loses the nerve before she tries.

“Sweet boy, there was a war, you understand? Before you were born. It started far from here, but it seemed as though everyone in the world took part in it. Your father and I fought for Leicester— to protect her, and her people. Just like you protected Sven’s sheep from the wolves.” She forces her quivering lips into a smile, although it does little to quell the old memories roaring awake in her mind. “My darling, it was a difficult time. In the end, we... We lost each other— were separated —with neither one of us knowing where the other had gone. Then I learned that soon you would come into the world, and I needed to find a place for you to— well, it’s been a lovely home, hasn’t it, these hills?”

Arvid pushes against his cup with his pointer finger, watching as the steamy tea sloshes against the rim. “You said my father was gone,” he challenges. His eyes flick up to meet her own for a moment, and steal the breath from her lungs. It takes all of her strength to stop herself from dashing forward to sweep him into her arms. But he isn’t a babe in swaddling any longer, she knows, and she knows that the truth of everything will demand more of him than what’s fair to expect from an eight year old boy. “You said he was _dead_.”

“I thought he was, Arvid. I didn’t lie to you. I thought the war had taken him from us, just like he thought it’d done to me and you.”

His lips pucker into a frown. “Did you get hurt?”

“I,” she stutters, voice catching in the vice of her throat, “I’m fine, my darling. You see me here, don’t you? And so is your father, and so are you. Healthy, and safe, and so happy to be together, here, with you. So _proud_ of you.”

She hears Khalid’s breath catch. Arvid fidgets. He dares another look in her direction.

“...But why can’t we stay here? I don’t want to leave,” he mutters.

“I know. But what a wonderful adventure we’ll have. We’ll see the mountains, and the Narrow Pass,” she remembers from her old lessons on Almyra, more recently recounted to her by Arvid with breathless excitement after his visits to the bakery, his nose still dusted with flour, “and the Great Dunes, hm? And then the Sea of Morfis,” she adds, tracing the map in her mind to the island off the southern coast of Almyra’s mainland where it’s storied capital resides. “I heard that they have seabirds as big as little boys there, and whales the size of houses, who can leap as far as Azzi can fly with one swoop of their tails. Wouldn’t you like to see them?”

Arvid shrugs. He drags his sleeve across his nose. “I dunno.”

She smiles, feeling the scales beginning to tip in their favor. “And there are so many who are so excited to meet you, sweetling. To show you the places where your family has lived for a long, long time. Your place, Arvid. Your home.”

“...Can Miss Hadiya come?”

“Oh, no,” Hadiya interjects on her own behalf. She smiles and reaches forward to pat Arvid on the shoulder. “My fate has taken me from Almyra, just like yours will take you there.”

“But I want to stay with you!”

“Pah! You say that as though you mean to tell me that you’ll never visit your poor old Hadiya, eh?” She ruffles her fingers through his hair. “Soon that wyvern of yours will be large enough to ride. It’s a fine flight from Myr: three days along the Sapphire Coast. There’s pink shells along the shore there, as big as melons, and when you put them against your ear you can hear the sound of the sea, even if you’re a thousand leagues away. You bring me one once Azzi can carry you. By then you’ll have fine stories to tell me, and I’ll have some for you.” Hadiya stands and plucks a wooden peel from its lean against the wall. She brandishes it against the heat of one of her ovens, scooping it into its roaring red depths to emerge with a golden-baked loaf of bread balanced across the face. She eases it onto a towel spread across a nearby workspace and gingerly wraps the fabric around the treat until its doubled over enough to be held.

“There we are,” she says with a satisfied sigh. “Come here, wild boy, and give your father the gift we’ve made him.”

Arvid dips his head against his chest, the way he always does when he’s embarrassed. Still, no amount of self consciousness will stop him from listening to Hadiya. He slips from his chair and slinks to her side. Emboldened by a nod of her head, he takes the loaf from the table and turns to approach Khalid and Hilda. Khalid stands from his chair, sensing the sudden gravity of the moment.

“..Here,” Arvid mumbles, waving the bread forward with both hands. Hadiya clicks her tongue. “For you, sir.”

“Thank you, Arvid.” Khalid takes the loaf with a reverent touch. His voice has softened into a tone that Hilda has never heard him use before. Arvid tucks his chin tighter against his chest.

“Good,” says Hadiya. Arvid takes it as permission to finally leave. He darts forward before any of them can stop him, weaving between his mother and the table to slip outside. Hilda sighs and shakes her head, listening to Azzi’s happy chirps as her son and his wyvern are reunited.

“Go on,” Hadiya reassures her. “The world is a frightening thing. It makes no matter. We all face it eventually. Your boy will do well. You’ll see.”

“Thank you, Hadiya.”

It isn’t nearly enough, but what else can Hilda say? She’s already planned to give her little house to Hadiya, along with whatever creatures she fancies, but it’s a humble gift in exchange for what she’s been offered across so many difficult years. Hadiya smiles and sweeps her into a hug.

“What thanks do you owe me?” She steps back a pace, warm hands on Hilda’s arms as she looks her. “None of us have walked an easy path, but you’ve given mine color. It’s a good trade, I think. And here, of all places...Let’s say that it wasn’t what I expected. How glad I am to have been surprised. So you watch over them both, Khalid.” She glances over Hilda’s shoulder with a mischievous tilt to her smile. “Son of Riegan, is that right? You do well in raising that boy, or I’ll come find you and show you how it’s done.”

“I promise it,” Khalid pledges. Hadiya nods.

“Good.” She lifts onto her toes to peek out one of the nearby windows. “You’d better hurry, then. Arne’s found your men. He’ll drink them cross-eyed if you aren’t quick.”

Hilda turns and frowns when she spots the blurred figures of what must be Arne and Baraz through the thick window panes. Arvid’s smaller smudge is beside them, stopped in his escape by whatever escapade the drunkard has dreamed up. She gives Hadiya a final grateful look before turning to rescue them.

“...spectacular,” Baraz’s voice exclaims at the moment she’s made it to the bakery’s threshold. “Dandelions, you say?”

Arne cackles. “Aye, ‘nd more, but yer not gettin’ no secrets from me!”

“ _Idiot_ ,” Sanaz mutters.

Khalid makes a noise under his breath. At first Hilda thinks it’s the sound of his bemusement from the doomed comedy unfolding in the square, but then she notices that he’s stopped. She turns to spot him carefully peeling back the cloth from the bread Arvid had given him, still lingering at the wall that separates the bakery from the world beyond it.

“What is it?”

He turns the bundle in her direction to display a small design formed with strips of dough baked into the top of the loaf. Hilda squints and tilts her head until she makes it out: it’s a sun, she thinks, with a thumbprint circle at the center and six rays like pyramids along the sides. A half moon is pieced beneath it, pierced through the middle by a line topped with a smaller daub of dough that she supposes could be an arrowhead, or maybe a wayward star.

“Well?” she insists, still puzzled by the strange mixture of amusement and surprise spilled across the smiling shape of his lips.

“This is my father’s mark,” he explains. “Almyra’s always used the mounted archer, but our family sigil is different. We don’t use it for anything anymore; not officially, at least. What did you tell her?”

“Not that,” Hilda replies. She feels herself grow somewhat breathless as she stares at the bakery’s closed door. She hadn’t even told Arvid the full truth of who, or what, Khalid is. And what had Hadiya meant, really, when she’d said that their friendship hadn’t been what she’d expected?

“I don’t know,” she admits aloud, shaking her head. She purses her lips for more, but is interrupted by Baraz’s sudden coughing fit, and the response of Arvid’s boyish laughter. Sanaz joins in along with the crack of her palm as she slaps her brother’s back to settle the overindulgent drink he’s just taken from Arne’s noxious moonshine still. Hilda turns and watches them, relief flooding her with teary eyes as she listens to Arvid continue to giggle and chatter with Sanaz. The woman chastises the two men at their side. Azzi dances between their legs, matching his master’s lifting mood with the energetic whip of his tail.

Khalid steps forward into the square. He’s close enough to her to touch, although this time neither of them musters the courage to move. She lets herself be distracted by Arvid’s thrilled laughter and decides, despite the enormous unknown of everything around her, that in that moment, it is enough.

* * *

Arvid refuses to ride with Hilda when they leave for Almyra. She knows that it’s not the last time that he’ll reject something that’d once been precious to them both. But there are eight members of Khalid’s entourage, each full grown and impressive, and Arvid is desperate to show them that he’s no babe clinging to his mother’s skirts. 

Luckily Baraz comes to their rescue, offering a spot on his saddle with a promise made to both parents to fly steady and slow. She’s not thrilled about it, but he at least hands over his flask (filled with Arne’s brew, shockingly) to his brother to prove his commitment to the task. During these last few days on the homestead, at least, Arvid forgets about the trauma of abandoning his childhood home. He struts around the yard instead, miming his uncle’s long-legged stride as he prepares his short bow, and his new quiver, and instructs Azzi on how to follow along. 

It’s better that it isn’t Khalid who’s destined to share his saddle. Arvid has accepted Baraz and Sanaz as unusual playmates, and finds the rest of the entourage to be an interesting backdrop of noise and colorful robes, but his early friendship with his father has transformed into bashful avoidance. If this hurts Khalid’s feelings, he makes a good show of hiding it, instead dedicating himself to the lion’s share of the work in settling Hilda’s affairs.

His men don’t question his orders to linger, nor do they gossip about the sight of him with a pitchfork slung over his shoulder as he and Baraz pull a mildewed section of fodder from the hayloft. Someone unfamiliar with the game of nobility might have interpreted this as a slight against the gravity of Khalid’s position, but Hilda knows that it’s the opposite. She makes quiet note of their unwavering loyalty, although she isn’t yet certain what it means.

The homestead’s tools are collected and neatly lined up for their future masters. The dust is swept from the corners of the cellar, and the dried goods inside reorganized so that Hadiya can more easily decide what to keep and what to offer to the others. Hilda hides most of her clothes before any of them can find them. It’s easier than pretending not to be mortified by Khalid assuring her that there’ll be far better options for her once they’ve left her pitiful wardrobe behind.

Neither she nor Arvid have much to pack into Kala’s saddlebags. She chooses the books from Enbarr, along with a string of glass beads from Hadiya, and a carved stick Arvid had presented her with for her most recent birthday, slightly reminiscent in shape with one of Sven’s sheepdogs.

Once she’s finished with their packs, she runs out of ways to avoid the relics buried beneath the hearthstone. As it so happens, this inevitability lands on the final night before their departure. Somehow Khalid senses that something has changed in how she muddles through her chores. Instead of retiring to his bedroll in the choicest section of the barn, he lingers at the kitchen table after their dinner. Arvid grows mute once Baraz and Sanaz have left to begin their pointless rounds of the homestead’s borders, as has become his custom in Khalid’s undivided presence. It doesn’t take long before he’s retreated to his loft with Azzi at his heels

Hilda and Khalid wait in silence, sipping at cups of tea until Arvid’s restless tossing and turning calms into snores. Hilda stands from the kitchen table and takes the poker from its place beside the hearth. She leverages the point under the corner of the hearthstone and pries it up from the earth.

Failnaught must sing like Freikugel does. Khalid stands once the stone has been pulled aside. He watches as Hilda kneels to pull the first bundle from the ground. She sets her axe aside before reaching deeper for the bow. The earth at the bottom of the hole is as cold as the night outside. The relic feels like a warm body. She unwraps it from its canvas before offering it to him, mindful of its eerie edges and sharp spines.

His face is perfectly still when he accepts it. The Crest stone stirs to life with a red wink at his touch. He turns the bow from side to side, silent, appraising, before he sighs and drops it to hold at his side. For a moment it seems as though he means to tell her something, but he abandons it. Instead he nods, stern, grey-faced, and turns, and leaves her alone to the fire crackling in the hearth.

She feels each inch of the wind-blown field that he walks between them.

* * *

Wyverns, Hilda has learned, are rarely very different from their masters. Azzi is the embodiment of Arvid’s mischief. Kala, her own mount, far prefers an afternoon nap in the sun over the feeling of wind in her wings. Sanaz’s green wyvern is massive and mean-tempered, although it tolerates Baraz’s black-scaled beast, a lean creature which slinks through the air like a boneless snake. 

Khalid’s wyvern is grand. While not as large as Sanaz’s, it makes up for its size in its incredible gild scales, and boasts a formidable rack crowned with gold-capped prongs that glint like fire in the sunlight. The other creatures of their assembly— even Azzi, if only by instinct, hatched and raised as he’s been by human hands —drag their bellies submissively whenever the beast comes near.

She wonders if it really suits him. Khalid is an exceptional rider, of course. It’s not long after they’ve summited into the clouds with their long-awaited departure that he releases the horn of his saddle to lean into a more comfortable and precarious position. Her cheeks warm from the way his body moves in tandem with the wyvern’s serpentine flight.

In spite of that, she can’t help but think about the pale, pink-eyed creature that’d once been his mount. She’d never seen anything like it before, and hasn’t again since. There’d been something magical about it, as if it’d been proof that Khalid was the hero of a story told by lesser men.

Then again, they’d killed his white wyvern, hadn’t they?

She clears her throat and keeps her eyes focused on the grey blur of the earth. It changes as they fly. The hills roll and writhe. The hinterlands’ bleached tones darken into evergreen. By noon the earth has leapt up to meet them with snowcapped peaks. The crags are a bittersweet memento of her own girlhood home. She’s thankful that she’s riding alone, if only so that she can sniffle in peace when her self pity catches up with her.

The entourage travels at a lazy pace. Some of the men at the tail of their party shout a song over the wind. Hilda flies close enough to Baraz that she can hear Arvid chattering: first a spirited interrogation about Myr, and then a fanciful story of Arvid’s own invention, which Baraz humors with impressive patience. Azzi floats between them under Kala’s watchful eye.

They eat while mounted to make the most of their daylight hours. Hilda’s back begins to ache. Her thighs burn from the unfamiliar strain of a long ride. She seems to be the only one affected. It isn’t so easy to pretend that it doesn’t bother her, although she certainly tries.

Her respite comes at sundown. By then they’ve crossed the mountains— formidable on land and mere fancies in the sky, and she knows there’s something to be said about that, now that they’ve crossed the border in a day that her family has shed blood for centuries to defend—and begun to cast their shadows on the red sand of the dunes beyond. The glitter of glass and firelight catches her eye just as the sky starts to darken.

They circle the city twice before Khalid picks where to land. Hilda knows by the lack of a coast that it isn’t the capital, but it would be easy to be convinced otherwise. The city is massive. Even in the dusk she can see the bustle of it: markets, temples, homes, all painted white to ward off the sweltering daylight and draped with colorful awnings that’ve darkened into luscious shades of navy by the setting sun. All of it circles around the blue bullseye of a massive oasis that might as well be its own sea.

There’s a strange orderliness to the city, despite how many years she’s spent with fewer neighbors than the fingers on both of her hands. She eases Kala to the ground and takes it all in with a shaky breath. At first she fears that Arvid will be overwhelmed, but it’s a concern that she’ll have to face in the morning. The day’s excitement has already exhausted him. Baraz balances the sleeping boy on his shoulders, winking good-naturedly at Hilda after she’s slung herself from her saddle and minced two stiff steps forward.

A party is ready to greet them. The entourage falls into the second half of a well-practiced choreography. It starts off stilted until a tall, broad-chested man breaks through the line of their hosts and clasps Khalid by the forearm. Hilda is too tired to make out most of what they say to one another, but she catches enough to understand that they’re being taken somewhere more private for the evening, which is a relief. Khalid had promised no fanfare, but it seems impossible in a place like this.

They trail through a set of winding alleys. It seems to do the trick. Some children coo and catcall out the windows above their heads, but for the most part they travel unmolested. It gives Hilda the time to admire the strings of lights strung between the balconies, although the magefire keeping them alight still makes the hair on her arms stand on end. She can smell the spices of finished dinners drifting through the air. It’s matched with an alluring perfume from the strange purple flowers that seem to crawl over every curb and rafter.

Maybe it’s their long flight, or the enduring absurdity of her current situation, but Hilda can’t help but feel as though she’s been tossed into a fairy tale. The effect only grows more elaborate when their host brings them to a richly decorated terrace that overlooks the glittering cityscape.

“ _And where will you sleep?_ ” she hears Khalid challenge.

“ _Ah, on the streets,_ ” their host replies with the theatrical sweep of his arm. “ _Under the stars, like a blessed beggar._ ”

“ _Babak_ ,” Khalid sighs, shaking his head. “ _This isn’t necessary._ ”

“ _Jealous, are you? Ha! The trappings are for you, now, boy. Go on. Knock the dust from your pretty cloak. The council wishes to speak with you. Impatient old bastards. They’ll feed you for it, at least._ ”

“ _Fine. Good. Alright,_ ” Khalid replies. He waves the man aside with the flash of his hand. “ _I’ll see to them soon enough. Are they in the gardens?_ ”

“ _Yes, of course. You know how they like their flowers._ ”

Khalid nods. “ _Very well. Keep them entertained until I’m ready, won’t you?_ ”

“ _You ask too much of me, Your Grace,_ ” the man called Babak laughs. “ _But as always, I am your humble servant. Laleh, show his Eminence to the rooms we’ve prepared for him._ ”

A woman materializes from the shadows to nod her agreement. She bows with a practiced grace. Babak and Khalid part ways. More figures dressed in the same tidy style appear to usher Khalid towards the rightward half of the terrace. He follows with broad, assertive steps. The woman remains bent forward, eyes downcast deferentially until Baraz and Hilda bring up the rear.

“ _Laleh_ ,” he greets her smoothly, voice muted into a whisper as to not disturb the slumbering boy on his back. “ _Is it possible that you’ve grown even more beautiful in our time apart?_ ”

She rolls her eyes and falls in step with him as they follow after where Khalid has gone. “ _As always, you are shameless.”_ She studies Arvid and Hilda with a downcast stare that makes her feel both furious and quarter-sized. “ _Is this another one of your poor pups? I’ve lost count of them._ ”

“ _It’s not, in fact,_ ” Baraz informs her. “ _And you’d be better off if you were more polite about it, desert-flower._ ” His eyes dart in Hilda’s direction. The woman follows suit. Her face slackens with mortification.

“ _Forgive me,_ ” she stammers. Arvid grumbles in his sleep. Baraz slows his step to find a better grip on the boy’s gangly legs in order to hitch him higher. Hilda decides to be magnanimous, if only not to disturb him further. She nods, and tries to stop herself from growing more embarrassed by the relief flooding the woman’s face. 

“ _I’d recommend you give her a good room,_ ” Baraz adds slyly. Laleh dances forward with a panicked double-step. It seems to correct their course. They trail up a set of spiraling steps onto a new platform built at the height of the towering complex. Hilda spots the gold hem of Khalid’s robes flicking through a doorway at the other end.

“ _Here we are,_ ” Laleh says, sing-song, slowing the pace of her words for what Hilda assumes is her benefit. She swings open a blue-painted door to reveal a sumptuous sitting room. A serving girl is inside, busy lighting fat, well-placed candles that cast a warm light on so much silk that it makes Hilda’s eyes blur. Laleh steers them inside. Her slender arms turn pirouettes as she signals to a set of open archways set into the far wall.

“ _There are a pair of suites there, my lady. To the right you’ll find a washroom. I’ll have the kitchens prepare something for you. Is there anything that you would prefer?_ ”

Hilda shakes her head. “ _No thank you,_ ” she attempts. Her tongue fumbles with the Almyran words. “ _Nothing tonight. I’d like rest._ ”

“ _Of course. Tea, then._ ” It seems as though Hilda has no choice. She nods. Laleh smiles. It’s a pretty sight, at least: Hilda can understand why Baraz has a made himself a bad reputation with her. “ _And some fruit, at least. And anything else, at your pleasure. You’ll find a bell at your bedside. You need only ring it. My girls and I have good ears._ ”

“ _Thank you._ ”

Laleh bends forward into another bow. She casts Baraz a poorly-hidden glare before back-stepping politely towards the door to return to the bustle of the serving staff outside, who have blended with Khalid’s entourage as they’re all herded into their own places for the night.

“She’s harmless,” Baraz promises her once they find themselves alone. Hilda sighs and rolls her eyes. It’s not like this is the first time that she’s been involved in court intrigue. She knows that no one is harmless. “I’ll put the lad to bed?”

“Thank you.”

Hilda walks with him into one of the rooms. Baraz carefully lays Arvid down on the bed. Arvid wrinkles his nose in his sleep and smacks his lips before turning on his side to cuddle more comfortably into the blankets. It helps to unwind the tight knot in Hilda’s chest.

“Thank you,” she says again once they’ve traced their way back into the sitting room. “For everything.”

“Pah, of course.” He waves off her words. “He’s a good boy. Fantastic storyteller.” They both grin knowingly. “It’s funny. He reminds me of my eldest, but he’s much smarter, like Ehsan— one of my littler ones. A dangerous combination. You’ll have your hands full.” He musses his wind-blown hair, which is a roguish take on what Khalid wears: a little longer, a little thicker in the curl. “Fascinating, how blood works like that. We’re all just parts of one another put back together in different ways.”

“I suppose so.”

“It’s good to have you here,” Baraz adds. It makes her simmer in her embarrassment, but she knows it’s well intentioned. “You’ll like it. I’m not surprised Khalid picked it, the clever bastard.”

“This city?”

“Yes. Jidah. I’ll let him tell you why, but I’d bet good money that we’ll catch our breath here for a while. Not that I’m complaining. It’s beautiful— and not just the people. You can see it now, but it’s even better during the day. They grow the best peaches I’ve ever eaten. You wouldn’t think they would. Makes no sense, place like this, out in the middle of all this sand, but they manage it. Make a fabulous drink out of it, too.” He raises his hands at her palm-forward when she gives him a scowl. “Just a suggestion. And another one: get some rest. I’ll be outside if you need me.”

She frowns. “You don’t need to do that.”

“Khalid’s orders,” he replies. It’s simple, but she can hear the finality in his words.

“Fine,” she sighs. “Thank you.”

“Of course. Goodnight.” He sweeps forward in a mimicry of Laleh’s bow. Hilda is reminded of the first time she’d met him. It already seems so far away, now that they’ve traded the snowy hinterlands for the sun-spilt desert. At least the night is just as cold. She breathes it in and watches as Baraz takes a spot along the rail lining the terrace outside before she closes the door.

The rich room regards her dispassionately. She trails her fingers over a lavender settee. There are plump pillows arranged across the cushions, themselves already far softer than her mattress at home. Home no more, she reminds herself, eyes downcast on the thick carpets as they swallow up her footsteps. The room is warm, although there is no fireplace. There must be a trick to it. She isn’t certain if she wants to learn. It seems as though it’ll only drive a greater wedge between what she’s known, and how she’s lived, and how this life before her is fashioned. It makes her wish that she could be carried through it on the back of someone else, drowsing happily, without a care.

A knock at the door. She remembers Laleh’s promise of tea and fruit and sighs, bracing herself for another failed attempt at Almyran. No matter. It will be the last of it for the night, at least, although that says nothing for the morning after. She reaches for the door. The dark glimmer of gold greets her.

“Ah,” Khalid starts. “Hello.”

The cold air in her lungs grows hot. “Hello.”

He’s somehow made himself more stately by simply abandoning his traveling cloak. She realizes in that moment that she hasn’t yet had the opportunity to calm the wild frizz of her hair, which she’d braided early that morning in anticipation of their ride. Surely the plait has lost most of its charm, not to mention its structural integrity. That says nothing for the fact that the serving girls are all better dressed than she is. She forces her lips into an awkward smile. He does the same. It makes it worse.

“Well,” he says. “Are you well? It was a long ride.”

“A little tired,” she admits, because there’s no point in lying about it: surely she looks that way. “But all of this is... lovely.”

“Good. Yes.”

She’s never heard him stumble over his words like this before— not even that time he and Raphael had gotten into the monastery mead. It’s perplexing. He seems to sense it and stiffens, fiddling with the tiny buttons fixed along the center of his fine robes.

“Well,” he attempts again, “I’m afraid I owe some people here my time this evening. But in the morning— I have an idea. Would you humor me?”

“Of course.”

The wrinkle between his brows loosens slightly. “Whenever you feel rested. There’s a courtyard on the bottom story, just below us— you’ll find me there. At no particular hour. I have plenty to keep me busy, whether I like it or not.”

“Alright.”

“Do you have what you need in the meantime?”

“I do.”

“There should be a little bell—”

“I know how this works, Khalid,” she promises him dryly. His lips twitch into a smile.

“Right.” He runs his fingers over his beard. “Goodnight, then. Until the morning.”

“Goodnight.”

It probably isn’t the right farewell for his station. He doesn’t seem to mind. She watches him take a step back from the door, and closes it once he’s turned to address Baraz at his post at the end of the walk. Afterwards she finally kicks off her shoes, and unwinds the last stubborn rungs of her braid, and puffs out the candles so recently and carefully set alight in the sitting room.

Instead of heading to the empty bedroom she returns to Arvid’s side. He’s still sleeping, blissfully unaware of how the world around him has already changed. She eases herself carefully beside him, the way they’d slept when he’d been a littler boy. He snuggles closer to her, arm twitching as he fends off some foe in his dreams. She smiles and strokes the curls back from his brow.

The bed is soft. For once, Arvid isn’t preoccupied by acting fully-grown. She should be happy for it. But her mind drifts, the way it often does in the dark. She wonders why it is that she’s so disappointed that she’s been placed like an afterthought in a separate set of rooms. It’s just like her disappointment that Khalid had taken so quickly to sleeping in her barn. And she wonders just what it means that Claude’s name has changed to Khalid— and that his white wyvern has replaced by gold. Wonders just what the hell it is she thinks she’s doing at his side. 

* * *

As it so happens, Khalid’s plan is a good one. Hilda’s in a better mood to listen to it after a full night’s rest. She meets him in the most beautiful courtyard she’s ever seen. Just like Baraz had promised, it’s filled with an unusual breed of fragrant, half-sized peach trees. Arvid hangs anxiously at the edges of the garden with his uncle once he sees that the yard is empty except for Khalid and an intimidating collection of papers and scrolls.

“Good morning,” he greets her warmly, eyes still lingering on the last line of what she’s caught him reading before he stands from his cross-legged seat to meet her at the center of the yard. “Did you sleep well?”

She nods. “I did. It was wonderful,” she decides to admit, because it was, and she suspects it will please him, which it does. He smiles.

“Excellent. I must admit that I’m jealous that you avoided dinner. It was ten courses, but somehow eight of them were goat.” He scrunches his nose at the idea.

“That looks boring.” She nods at the scattered papers.

“It is,” he laughs. “You’d hate it. Want to give it a go?”

“Do you want to keep your kingdom?”

“You drive an interesting bargain.” He stretches his arm over his head and yawns. “It would give me more time. But on the other hand, I have so much to do that I’ll never finish it, you know? So by that reasoning, I have all the time in the world. And this is what I’m thinking I’ll do with it,” he adds, a mischievous glint sparking to life in his eyes.

“Scheming already?”

“Of course.” He peeks over her shoulder at their son. “This place—Jidah— it’s the only source of fresh water for two days in any direction. Good for people, but even better for wyverns. There’s a pass an hour or two’s ride from here where they like to roost. Hundreds of them. I thought that maybe Arvid would like to see them.”

He really is a genius. There’s no better path to Arvid’s heart than wings and scales. “You should go without me,” she suggests, although she knows this is what he’s already offered. “I don’t want to see a saddle for awhile.”

He laughs. “Fair enough. We’ll be good. Back by dinner. One you can join, if you’d like: there’ll be no bureaucrats.”

“Alright.”

“And if you’d like, I’d suggest you talk a walk through the markets,” he adds. He trails to a far wall, pointing towards a checkerboard of streets and stalls in the city spread below them. “Anyone who lives here will tell you that they’re the finest in the country. They’ll say that about anything, but in this case, at least, I think they’re right.”

“I see.” It’s an intriguing offer, but the idea of submerging herself in so much noise again is daunting, to say the least. He smiles in a sweet sort of way that settles her nerves.

“I’ll ask Sanaz to stay with you, in case you want for anything. It’s more for her than for you,” he adds when he spots her bristling to reject the offer. “If I don’t keep her and Baraz separated from time to time, they’ll start to pick at each other. Entertaining, but it doesn’t set the best example. I’d like Arvid to think we’re decent folk... at least at the start.”

“They’re alright,” she counters. It’s already obvious that Arvid adores them both. 

He grins. “They are, aren’t they?” He cocks his elbow at an angle with his hand propped against his hip, watching as Baraz coaxes Arvid into plucking a peach from a nearby tree. “Good,” he finishes, voice softening. “It’s settled, then.”

* * *

Stepping from the terraced estate into the city streets feels like a cliffside dive. It’s ridiculous, Hilda knows: there’d been no one who’d known Derdriu better than she had, both its high streets and unsavory corners. She’d dominated Fhirdiad and Enbarr as a little girl accompanying her father during diplomatic visits. The heads of the other noble houses had always teased Duke Goneril, warning him that she’d be expensive to marry off if her bridegroom didn’t have a city to offer her. 

Jidah is nothing like Derdriu. There are so many people in the streets that she can barely see the white-painted walls of the buildings that border its perfectly-gridded boulevards. It’s nearly as hot as a summer day, now that the sun’s climbed higher, which only adds to the energy pulsing through the city like a heartbeat. Maybe it’s better to turn back, she wonders. Her rooms are cool, and quiet, and comfortable. Maybe she should crawl into her bed and sleep away the noise.

She sucks in a bracing breath and takes a step forward. The crowd parts to make way for her without giving her much mind. Sanaz follows at her heels, thumbs hooked in her belt, observing the stalls around them with a bored half-interest. Another step. Her heart hammers. The smell of cinnamon draws her forward.

“What’s that?”

Sanaz observes the little stall she’s pointed out, lorded over by a crook-backed woman stirring a bubbling pot. It’s filled with something creamy that smells like the entire spice rack in the Goneril kitchens back home.

“It’s a drink,” Sanaz explains. “Spices. Milk. Children are fond of it.” Her delivery makes it seem as though she doesn’t mean to mock Hilda, although she lacks her brother’s particular panache for flattery. “You want some?”

Hilda shouldn’t agree, but the truth of the matter is that if she doesn’t give her hands something to do, she’s liable to lose her mind. She nods. Sanaz nods, too, and digs a hand into her pocket to brandish a small golden coin.

“ _Two_ ,” she says to the vendor. She flashes the coin at the old woman before offering it, strangely enough, to Hilda. The vendor nods and selects two gaudily-painted paper cups from the side of her cart.

“What is this?” Hilda asks as she takes the coin from Sanaz. It has a familiar embossment: a sun and a crescent moon, joined together by a leaping arrow. She remembers it well from its baked variant pulled from Hadiya’s ovens.

“Credit.” Sanaz grunts her thanks at the vendor as she leans forward to take the steaming cups from her. She gives one to Hilda before burying her nose in her own. “I like this,” she admits. Hilda can’t help but grin.

They turn from the drinks vendor and slip back into the stream of the crowd. Hilda takes a tentative sip of her drink. It’s delicious. Thank the Goddess that it doesn’t make her lose her footing. How many years has it been since she’s had sugar? Spices? Even cream has been a luxury— or at least the sort that isn’t sharp and sour, milked from her mean-spirited goats. Her eyes water as she takes another drink.

“What do you mean?” she asks once she’s had a chance to recover from the bliss of flavor, and remembers the coin still tucked against her palm. Sanaz cocks a brow at her and stares, as if it’s the first time they’ve spoken all day. “Credit?”

“Ah.” Sanaz drains her cup and crushes it in her palm. Once crumpled, it’s hidden in her pocket. Hilda must admit that she admires that she doesn’t simply toss it to the ground. “This is our city,” she says, as if in answer to both trains of thought. “Jidah. A long time ago, before my family made kings. We were traders. Traders have good memories. They remember their debts. You show anyone that coin and they’ll give you what you want.”

“Thank you.”

Sanaz shrugs. “It’s not the only one. Besides, it’s yours. You’re in the blood now with your boy.”

Hilda’s cheeks flare. It’s a stupid thing to be embarrassed about. Still, even hinting at it makes it feel as though Sanaz has asked about the intimate particulars. She focuses on the crowd instead of prolonging the torture. Sanaz doesn’t seem to mind. Soon the memory of her voice disappears to the rolling din of the markets: hawkers’ calls, children’s laughter, braying donkeys, the occasional crack of a wyvern’s wings.

She loses herself in the rhythm of everything. It feels like the cork of a bottle slowly being pried off. This is what she’d loved about the cities: the music of it. A shy giddiness gathers in her stomach. It bubbles effervescent by the time they’ve made it to the heart of the market, crowned by beautiful fabric stalls strung with silk in every shade and thickness, frombrocades to translucent chiffon. There’s a performer at the very center juggling colorful balls to the delight of a gaggle of children dressed in dandelion yellows and evergreen. He times his tosses to the strum of another performer’s lute.

She does as she’d done as a girl of their own age. She turns a quick corner, and then another, growing ever more triumphant as her stubborn chaperone falls further back. It’s not like Sanaz deserves it. It rather seems as though they’ve bonded with the spiced milk affair. But there’s something grand about walking through a city without being followed, no matter how well intentioned her interloper. She’s nearly winded by the time she properly manages it. She giggles to herself, shaking her head at what she’s done, and can’t help but wonder if Khalid will chide her for it. It’s impossible to imagine: after all, it’s not like he’s not been guilty of misbehavior too, in his own time.

She takes note of where her quick escape has taken her. It’s incredible luck. She’s found herself on a long bridge spanning the oasis’s southern shore. Both sides of the bridge are jammed-packed with glittering stalls. Gems, stones, gold; silver, copper; glass. Her fingertips tingle with anticipation.

Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with taking a quick look before she returns to Sanaz for an apology.

The idea quickly transforms into a dozen different plans. Arvid has already been chattering about Baraz’s earrings. No doubt soon he’ll beg to have one of his own. He’ll want gold, but maybe she can convince him to wear a ring with a garnet inlay. Goneril colors might be controversial in Almyra, but it seems like a sweet idea, at least. And she should send something to Hadiya, too, as a sign that they’ve made it across the border. Red tourmaline— as a pendant, perhaps; yes, that would be fetching. Or even citrine?

“ _It is lovely, isn’t it? But must you really ask such a price?_ ”

She listens idly to the woman beside her as she haggles with the closest merchant. Her eyes land on the gem in question, an audacious chunk of amethyst nearly the size of the woman’s fist. The woman, Hilda can’t help but note, is even more stunning than the stone. The lesser matter is that the amethyst, she realizes, looking again, isn’t an amethyst at all.

“ _For a rare gem like that? Yes, my lady, of course._ ” He tilts a mirror for her so that she can hold the stone up to her slender neck, tilting this way and that as she regards her reflection. “ _It is from the deepest mines in Morfis. They ride wyrms to find them— in the depths, no light at all. Very dangerous, you see._ ”

“ _I see._ ” The woman pouts. Her lips are as perfect as the rubies spilled across the stalls. “ _And it would catch the eye, wouldn’t it?_ ”

The desperate tone of her voice tugs at Hilda’s heart— or perhaps it’s simply the folly of watching a beauty in distress. After all, she might’ve not been born a boy, but she’d always been some version of a knight, no matter how hard she’d tried to escape it. She clears her throat and pulls on her most coquettish smile.

“ _That’s very fine,_ ” she remarks, speaking slow, so that the Almyran comes out right. The woman turns, surprised, although she offers her a polite smile as she listens to what Hilda has to offer. “ _I’ve never seen such a convincing glass stone before._ ”

The merchant sputters. “ _Glass? My lady is mistaken._ ”

“ _And yet see how it catches the light? How peculiar,_ ” Hilda replies. The man’s face darkens tellingly. The woman at her side erupts in birdsong laughter.

“ _You cad,_ ” she cries, handing the sham amethyst back to him. “ _Oh, look at him, just like a tomato. Come,_ ” say says, turning to Hilda as she strings their arms together at the elbow, “ _quickly, now, or he’ll try to sell us a window pane._ ”

Hilda lets her drag her away, although it wasn’t part of the plan. She’s at the very limit of her vocabulary as it is.

“ _Thank you,_ ” the woman says once they’ve made it to the stalls on the other side of the bridge. She sighs and shakes her head. “ _What a fool I am for pretty things._ ” She slips her arm free and steps back a pace to look Hilda over. “ _You’ve saved the day. I would’ve spent every penny I have and been no better for it._ ”

“ _No matter,_ ” Hilda replies.

“ _Hardly._ ” The woman tucks back a strand of her hair, glossy and black and perfect compared to the frizzed braid wrapped around Hilda’s crown. “ _Pardon, but are you from the west?_ ”

She supposes she would be difficult to mistaken as Almyran. “ _I am._ ”

“Perhaps we can have a trade,” the woman replies, leaping into Fodlani without a tangle of her tongue. “You’re alone, aren’t you? I know this city well. Not the gemstones, obviously, but the other parts. Food. Wine. Help me find what I’m looking for and I can help you, too, hm?”

Hilda glances over her shoulder at the terraced estate looming above the city’s squat skyline. She has a few hours yet until Khalid and the rest return, judging by the position of the sun and her son’s undoubted fascination in the wyverns they’ve traveled to visit. And it is intriguing to consider making a friend who isn’t related to either of them.

“What are you looking for?” she compromises. The woman offers her a sparkling smile.

“Something beautiful— the sort to catch the eye of a man whose mind often wanders. Everyone in this city seems to be some sort of prince or magister, or what have you, but I’ve earned each coin I own, you understand? I’m willing to part with it, but I can’t waste it. Please. You see how useless I am at it— _glass!_ ”

Hilda’s lips twitch. “Alright. But not for too long.”

“Splendid.” The woman slips her arm through Hilda’s again and turns her towards the nearest stall. “My name is Parisa,” she adds.

“Hilda,” she decides to reveal. It’s not like that’s the notorious part of her name, at least.

“A pleasure to meet you, Hilda.”

They trail along a stall boasting an extensive lapis collection. While lovely, Hilda thinks this Parisa would be better suited with a translucent stone. She tells her the same. Parisa nods with a solemn hum.

“Yes,” she says. “Very good.”

“What color?”

“Hm?”

“For the stone,” Hilda explains. “What color would you prefer?”

Parisa considers the question. It doesn’t seem as though she’s given her quest ample forethought. Hilda would tease her, if she hadn’t just met her, and if she wasn’t the first young woman she’s spoken to in eight years. It seems too precious an opportunity to compromise. Goddess, maybe they’ll even _gossip_. It’s a tantalizing proposal after so much time spent discussing egg yields with old men.

“Well it depends, don’t you suppose? On what he prefers as well? Although I’ve never known a man to love jewelry, however fond they are of purchasing it.” Parisa pouts. “Oh dear. I suppose I’ve gone about this backwards.”

“But what do _you_ like?”

“None of it,” Parisa admits with the arch of her slender brows. “I’d live naked if I could. I’m sorry,” she quickly amends. “That was forward, wasn’t it? I’m usually much better about this. You’ve met me at an odd time, that is to say, my dear.”

“To be honest, so have you.”

Parisa’s smile widens. She pats Hilda on the arm. “Splendid. What a match we are, then: strangers in strange times.” She pauses to study a new display. “Ah. Look here. I’ve seen him wearing a ring like this before.”

She plucks the ring from the table and brings it up for Hilda to review. It’s a simple enough thing: a golden band with a square-cut garnet at the center. Hilda considers it with an expert eye before setting it back into place.

“Maybe a brighter stone,” she offers. “To set off your hair.” Parisa nods.

“Whatever you say. I’m desperate.”

Hilda laughs. It makes Parisa’s pout return. “I’m sorry. It’s just... look at you.” Hilda uses her free arm to gesture at the woman’s slender body, all perfectly formed, as some rare creatures as blessed to be, especially when they aren’t given war-axes.

“That’s very kind of you to say. I suppose I would say the same to another woman in my position. But he isn’t a despot. Is that what you mean to say next? I am a fool, but not of that breed to be abused by the unkind. He’s simply...terribly _serious_. Like a statue, most times. It’s hard enough to stir a sentence out of him, let alone affection.”

“That isn’t to say that he doesn’t deserve it. All of us should be given some gentleness. So that is my charge. I’ve given it to myself, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not important. And I must admit that I am terribly fond of him. If a pretty stone is what convinces him to look at me, and not simply tolerate me, but see that I am truly there, and his, then so be it. I shall buy a thousand of them. I can only hope that this is the end of it. I’ve already exhausted my silks and oils.” She screws her lips into a frown. “I’m sorry. I’ve... It’s just that my sisters aren’t terribly sympathetic. They call me a hopeless romantic. They’ve stopped listening to me outright, as of late. It’s nice to talk about it. I know I shouldn’t burden you. To have just met...You must find me a little mad.”

“A little.” They both laugh. “But I could use some hopeless romance.” She sweeps her hand at her dishwater-colored surcoat, letting the dismay of her attire show on her face as well.

“Fabulous,” Parisa sighs, pleased. She draws Hilda a little closer to her with the squeeze of her arm. “Let us both be hopeless.”

* * *

In the end, they settle on a set of tart lime peridot earrings for Parisa and a lovely rose-colored ensemble for Hilda, built from the pieces that she’s seen other women wearing now that she’s jumped the border: first, a pair of wide-legged trousers with a delicate white embroidery around the cuffs and along the sides; atop that, a long chemise as soft as the petals of a freshly-bloomed rose, and the color of it, too; and finally a robe to match, accented with vertical panels filled with embroidered flowers sewn in sweet pastels. It’s a sin to cover it with her surcoat again as they leave the tailor’s shop, but at least Hilda can revel in the feeling of real clothes against her skin. 

Parisa teases her for the modest cut of her new outfit, but is satisfied by Hilda’s explanation about the winter chill. She doesn’t mention the scars she hides under her sleeves and beneath the legs of her trousers. Strangers that they are, Parisa doesn’t know to ask about them. 

They part just as the sun has set with the promise to reunite in Myr— where Parisa has come from, Hilda learns, expressly with the hope of finding the earrings she now has so proudly in her possession —and a final overindulgent thank you (to Hilda, for her gem expertise; to Parisa, for paying for Hilda’s ensemble out of the debt the tailor had already owed her, which Hilda had explained was unnecessary, that golden coin burning a hole in her pocket, and yet which Parisa had nonetheless insisted upon).

Hilda waves her off as she disappears into the crowd. Her smile remains even after Parisa has gone. It’s frivolous, maybe; foolish, more likely. She’s lucky that she hasn’t been kidnapped for how quickly she’d made a friend. But what a wonder it is. A friend, not made from blood, neither spilled nor in her own veins, but rather simply from being in the right place at the right time. She runs her fingers over the pretty designs woven into her collar and luxuriates on the feeling as she braces herself for what must be Sanaz’s looming reprimand. 

She doesn’t find it, although she does find the woman waiting for her at the steps leading up into the estate. Sanaz regards her with an even eye as she sets aside the vicious-looking blade Hilda has interrupted her in polishing.

“Finished?”

“I’m sorry,” Hilda blurts. “For running off.”

Sanaz shrugs. It’s not entirely satisfying, given the drama Hilda had dreamed up as she’d prepared herself for retribution.

“I didn’t mean to worry you,” she amends as they begin their climb to the terrace.

“Baraz has told me who you are,” Sanaz replies. “You were Khalid’s shield-maiden, yes?”

“Yes.” Hilda does her best to swallow the implications of her answer in the shortness of the reply. Sanaz nods.

“You do not need a guard. Jidah’s merchants will not hurt you.”

“I suppose not.”

They come to the peach tree courtyard. Sanaz turns and catches Hilda’s eye.

“I told you. We traders remember debts. I will help you. As you want it, Hilda.”

* * *

The day is a triumph. 

Arvid recounts the wyverns with such excitement that he barely manages to eat his meal. And what a meal it is: as a first course, fruits that Hilda’s never seen before, in every shade of pink and orange, served with fat circles of cheese that, thank the Goddess, don’t smell like a barn; and towers of sliced fennel as sweet as licorice, drizzled with oils so fine she could drink them by the cupful; squabs stuffed with currants— and Arvid has never even _seen_ squab, or currants, for that matter, or any of it— and salty little fish with staring eyes that make him giggle so hard he forgets his place in a story about wyvern hatchlings and has to start over.

He only has a chance to eat when Khalid takes over his storytelling. They sit side by side, the mirror image of each other as they mime the soaring creatures with the swoops of their flattened hands. Sweet cream custard finishes the meal just as they’ve started to talk over one another, both stumbling to shout the punchline that a bull-wyvern had taken a formidable bite out of Baraz’s cloak. Baraz wounded pride is only marginally repaired by the delivery of decanters of what Hilda learns is the city’s famous peach wine.

It could all be dust and stale bread, for all she cares. There was no gemstone in the market grand enough to take away from the shine of Arvid’s unabashed admiration for his father. Khalid compliments Hilda’s new clothes as well: on three separate occasions, in fact, to the point that even Sanaz snorts when he blurts it out for the forth time after he’s been emboldened by his first glass of wine.

Glass two finds Arvid ushered off to bed with his trophy of an old wyvern scale still proudly displayed to each servant and milling middleman in between the garden and their rooms upstairs. Glass three, and Sanaz spoils the secret of Hilda’s escape, which makes Khalid grin in a decidedly un-kingly way. This time Hilda catches how his sister watches him, and the relief in her eyes at seeing him act in a manner that is so familiar to Hilda, and yet must be a novelty to those who’ve come to know him since.

It makes her happy: all of it. The damned wine, even. She sips her fourth glass with a fuzzy head, side-by-side with Khalid on the highest balcony overlooking the diamond skyline. They are alone. For the first time, she doesn’t notice it. Her thoughts linger on the warmth of his body instead, reaching out to her through the chill, and on the beauty of the city at night.

“I love it here,” he admits aloud, as if he’s read her thoughts. She hums her agreement and dares to lean a little closer to him, arms still crossed against the rail of the balcony, like the bar of his own. “When I was younger, I’d sneak out here all the time. It drove my father crazy.”

“It didn’t intimidate you?”

“No.” He smiles in a nostalgic sort of way. “It was good to get lost in it. No one gave a damn who I was. They still don’t, really. When I was in Myr it was as if I always had a thousand eyes on me at all times. Here I had none, unless I wanted them. For some reason it was the only place where I wouldn’t feel...lonely.” He shakes his head. “I guess that’s backwards, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think so.” She lets her gaze grow unfocused, luxuriating in the blurred mosaic of the lights strung across the streets below. “When I was a girl, sometimes I’d dress in the wrong colors and go to market, pretending to be someone else. They all knew who I was, of course. It was a silly idea. But I liked it. Doing what I wanted without worrying about what my father would say, or what I was supposed to do.”

“I always admired that about you,” he admits. She glances over at him, surprised. “Doing whatever you wanted. You had us all twisted around your little finger.”

She laughs. “Is that what you thought? To be honest, I think it was too much work. Defeated the purpose, you know? It probably would’ve been less effort if I’d just done what I was told.”

“I can’t imagine it.”

“No,” she says with a grin. “I suppose you’re right.”

They fall into a lull to listen to the city’s night-time hum.

“Did you know? When we first met each other— I’ve always wondered —did you know that I wasn’t who I said I was?” he asks after awhile. It’s a big question, but somehow the combination of the wine and the beauty of everything makes it easy to answer.

“Not everything. Not at first. I knew that you were Almyran. You didn’t try very hard to hide it.”

He laughs. “Maybe not.”

“Although no one else seemed to catch on, did they?”

“Not even Cyril,” Claude reveals with a grin. “It drove me crazy.”

“Oh, they were all so caught up in their own worlds,” she sighs, lips slipping into a lopsided grin of her own. “They wouldn’t’ve noticed if their own robes were on fire if it didn’t suit them.” 

“But not you.”

Heat creeps up Hilda’s nape. “That’s not true. It suited me, too. No one’s ever called me selfless, you know.”

Khalid catches her eye. The playfulness from their banter has gone from his face. It’s been replaced by a wounded vulnerability that makes her chest ache.

“No,” he concedes quietly. “But you were the only one who I could trust.”

“At the monastery?”

“Anywhere.” His brows tighten into a pained shape. “ _Selfless_ , Hilda— you were everything to me.”

The words send a shiver down her spine. She could answer him with words, but what a fool she’d be. Instead she tips forward to meet his kiss. His beard prickles against her skin, coarse compared to the softness of his lips, which are sweet like hers from the wine. They stumble together at first, sharing a shudder at the border that’s been breached between them, but then Khalid cocks his head to the side for a better angle, and the sugar on his lips is replaced by the heat of his mouth.

It melts the tension woven through her body until she feels as though she’s being filled by all the gold he always wears. His thumb smooths over her cheek, tracing the curve of her ear to the lobe, and then to drumming line of her pulse along her neck, which he cups with a gentle caress. For a moment she feels as though she’s disappeared, replaced only by the tenderness of her lips and the small strip of skin between her jaw and her collar.

But then his fingers work over the flowers embroidered in her robes. Soon, she knows, they’ll find the hem that’ll pull them from her shoulders; and if they do, there will be less to guard her ugly scars from his gentle green eyes, and soon nothing at all. The thought adds a cruel panic to the pulse dancing in her ears. He senses it and slows, smoothing over her collarbone as he presses a final chaste kiss to her tingling lips.

He does not sulk at her rebuke, or challenge it, as absurd as it must seem. Instead he simply tucks her into the warmth under his arm and rests his cheek against her crown. She slips into the space he offers her and listens to his wild heartbeat as it calms into a reassuring drum. They watch the city sleep once more: dark, and sparkling, and brilliant. 

It is a triumph.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What a monster chapter! Thanks so much for making it through to the end :) I know there’s been lots of OCs, but not to worry, some familiar faces will be showing up soon as Hilda and Khalid continue their Almyran adventures. 
> 
> Thanks so much for reading, and for all of your feedback!


	5. The Dowager

For all of his talents, Baraz is perhaps not the best instructor Hilda has ever met. She’s certainly suffered through the full gamut of them. There’d been her steely governess, as pleased with her girlhood mastery of embroidery as she’d been devastated by Hilda’s absolute unwillingness to learn anything else; and Professor Casagranda, who’d been far easier to sway into overlooking Hilda’s frequent absences; and even Seteth, who she can only assume is now dead, which is a somber thought, no matter how repetitive she’d once found his axe-wielding lessons.

Baraz is not repetitive. She must give him that, at least.

“...and there’s all manner of rules for the temples,” he explains to his classroom of two tucked away into one of the terraced estate’s many rooms. “But they’re dreadfully boring.”

It’s that afternoon hour that lures most of the estate’s staff and guests alike into napping in the gardens. Arvid yawns and scribbles a circle into his notes. Hilda realizes, if unwillingly, that she is, in fact, the responsible party across their trio.

“Explain them,” she insists. She plants her chin in her palm and stares Baraz down. “The rules.”

“You’re joking.”

“I don’t want Myr to think that we’re a pair of heretics, Baraz.”

“Almyra isn’t like that,” he counters with the shake of his head.

She cocks a brow at him. “I doubt it.”

“Not like your old Church, at least,” he amends. “The people of Almyra are free to their own beliefs. A thousand of them or none. We have no heretics.”

“But you do have fools who misbehave in holy places and ruin their reputations.”

He sighs and leans back in his chair, running his fingers through his hair as he watches the rest of his afternoon be swallowed up by Hilda’s newfound sense of studiousness. Ultimately he relents to it, standing to saunter towards the long roll of parchment that he’d tacked to the wall at the start of their lesson. He snatches a quill as he moves, spattering it into an inkwell before he begins to scratch the nib against the paper.

“Fine. But remember, you’re the one who’s asked for this. There are one hundred and twenty seven temples in Myr,” he says, sketching out the number at the very top. Arvid copies the strokes on his own sheet of paper, finding a spot between his drawings of soaring wyverns and odd-shaped cats. His penmanship is a strange hodgepodge of Fodlani and Almyran thanks to Hadiya’s unfinished writing lessons.

“The priests are always building more, so don’t hold me to that number. If you ask me, my father gave them far too much freedom during his reign. Khalid seems of the mind to double down on the mistake.”

“What services do the priests provide?”

“Ceremonial nonsense. Festivals. Blessings. Feasts. I’m not saying that I dislike what they do, just that they go about it in the most _expensive_ ways. Frescoes everywhere. Gold leaf. _Statues_. It makes the artisans happy, of course, but it’s a nightmare for those of us responsible for keeping the treasury full.”

“I didn’t realize that you were a banker,” Hilda interrupts wryly. Baraz roles his eyes.

“Whenever my brother wants to punish me for something, yes. But his vizier takes on most of the responsibility, so don’t let him hear you give me any credit for it. He’ll say I’ve pissed on his precious territory.” Arvid giggles at the obscenity. Baraz grins at Hilda’s scowl. “Farzin is his name, the little weasel. He’s the most intelligent man in Myr, no doubt about it, but he’s insufferable in every single regard. I don’t think you’ll find him a fast friend. If you’re worried about your reputation, however, I’d recommend keeping your eye on him.” 

“Does Khalid have many viziers?”

“Yes, but not by name. We’ve muddied everything up with titles. Myr does so love them.” Baraz abandons his temple count to begin a new column of names. He starts with _Farzin al Fararm_ , taking his time to carefully write the Almyran letters for Hilda’s rudimentary eye. “Farzin is the son of one of my father’s less popular generals. He comes upon his title by merit, not by blood. _Grand Vizier_ is the proper address,” he says, adding the honorific by Farzin’s name, “but if you call him by it his head will swell so large that it’ll burst, so take that as fair warning. He’s the most senior member of my brother’s court from a civil perspective, but it’s not much help when he’s stacked against the rest of the family. Remind him of that, if you have the chance.”

Hilda smirks. It’s not as if this is the first time she’s been counseled on noble titles. She’ll have to try her best to avoid them altogether. They’re nothing but a headache, otherwise. 

“Sanaz and I sit on the royal council as well. _Imperial prince_ _and princess_ , we are, although I wouldn’t recommend calling Sanaz _princess_.” He adds _Baraz al Myr_ and _Sanaz al Myr_ to the list with a flourish of his quill. “Of course, Khalid could name us as viziers, too, but I’m not holding my breath for that to happen. Rumor is that I’m too unpredictable for the responsibility, which is utter nonsense. I’m the most predictable man in Myr.” He huffs and glares at the parchment for a moment before adding another name that Hilda recognizes. “And next comes the Queen Dowager, Tiana von Riegan. Do you know her?”

“I’ve met her, but only when I was a child.”

Baraz nods. “Khalid tells me that your families are nearly as complicated as ours. The Riegans and the Gonerils were allies, yes?”

“Yes. Always.”

“Good. That means you’ll have the Dowager on your side. It’s a rare place to find oneself...and immensely helpful. Khalid may be a king, but his mother rules the capital.”

“What do you think of her?”

“Me?” he laughs. “I find her terrifying. My mother was a gentle creature. She arranged flowers. That’s how my father met her. At the time it was a minor scandal, you know.” He rolls his quill between his fingertips, flicking little specks of ink across the parchment. “She was from a good family, but there wasn’t anything to be gained in taking her as a wife. My grandmother the Queen employed her to supply the palace with floral arrangements. My father caught her at it one afternoon, and decided that he was interested in more than her bouquets. He was only a prince at the time— not particularly well liked to take the crown, even. Courted her for months before she gave in. Very romantic. Do you know how he met the Dowager?”

Hilda shakes her head. He scoffs.

“She tried to _kill_ him. Nearly managed it, too.” He smacks a palm against his breast. Arvid gasps, utterly entranced. “Struck him with an arrow, right here, and gave him a nasty-looking scar that he carried for the rest of his life. He nearly bled out before she felt guilty about the regicide and came to his rescue. They were out in the middle of nowhere, the way he’d tell the story. Horrible weather. Took refuge in a cave. Six days of fever and spoiled wounds later, and he pledges himself to her as his one true love.”

“And your mother?”

Baraz waves away the idea. “Oh, they’d grown apart by then. To be honest, I think their courtship was longer lived than their affection for one another. It’s not so uncommon a thing. But my father was devoted to Lady Tiana until the day he died— and she to him.” He considers the notion with a bemused look. “In any case, after attempting to kill its king, the Dowager came to love Almyra and Almyra, the damned contrarians that we are, came to love her, too. She has Khalid’s ear as much as Farzin does, and for good reason.”

“It sounds like the council is a family affair,” Hilda notes. It’s not unusual. After all, the Roundtable had been nothing more than a brawl between a convoluted tangle of second-cousins and uncles, twice removed.

“Not entirely. The others are just far more dull. We have a court mage who speaks on behalf of the academies, but she doesn’t have much interest in politics, and even less in stepping foot in the palace. General Kir oversees the armed forces, but he’s as old as a mountain. Just as likely to speak as one, too. And then there’s Priestess Minu, who represents the faith. She’s an odd duck, but she doesn’t meddle as long as she gets her temples.”

“The rules,” Hilda remembers. Baraz scowls at having been caught.

“Oh, enough about rules. Don’t run naked through the temples,” he drawls. Arvid giggles. “Don’t spill blood in them. Try not to offend the priests unless they deserve it. You’ll learn the less important ones with time, trust me.”

Hilda sighs. It’s difficult enough to read Baraz’s handwriting, let alone memorize what he’s telling her. She’d much rather run off to the markets, but even she knows that she can’t delegate their integration into Almyra to Arvid, as keen as he is for the responsibility.

“Is one favored over the others by the court?” she attempts, thinking of the fractured Church of her youth. Baraz shakes his head.

“It doesn’t work that way. We have too many gods for that. That’s the beauty of it, really.” He plants a hand against the wall and drums his finger over the plaster. “Well. That isn’t entirely true. If you want to win over Priestess Minu, which isn’t a terrible idea, then you’ll want to name yourself as a patron to one of our temples. But that isn’t something that you have to do now. Seek out some time with Minu once we arrive in Myr and she’ll show them to you. All one hundred and twenty seven, gods help you. And it’ll be important for you to pick one, little prince,” he adds, turning on his heel to point at Arvid, who bolts to attention. “I’d wager that one day your father will want you on that council, too, so you’d might as well start currying favor.”

“How do I pick?” Arvid asks.

“The same way your mother will: think of what’s important to you, and pick the god that makes it so.”

“Do you have one?”

Baraz stifles a grin. “Yes, I do.”

“What is it?”

“Ah, well.” He palms a hand through his hair. “I’ll tell you when you’re a little older. But your father’s a patron to the god of luck. What do you think about that?”

Arvid beams. “Then I want to pick the god of luck, too!”

“Good, good. He’ll like that. He and his god haven’t always seen eye to eye, but I think with your help they’ll be friends again.” Baraz rubs his palms together and takes a final look at his thin attempt at a civics lesson. “Well. That’s enough for one afternoon, don’t you think?”

Hilda stares at the few lines scribbled across the parchment and sighs. “When is it that you think we’ll leave for Myr?”

“When you’re ready,” Baraz replies. “Although that may come more quickly than you think. The Grand Ferret Vizier has already started sending his lackeys to toss paperwork at our poor king, but soon they’ll come armed with summons. Khalid doesn’t like bringing politicians to Jidah, but it’s not like he can ignore his people, either. Dreadfully dutiful about that sort of thing.”

“Is he well liked?”

Baraz laughs under his breath, eyes darting to Arvid before they refocus on Hilda. “You know, that isn’t always a clever question to ask in public company.”

“I didn’t realize you were so discerning.”

He grins. “You wound me. _Discerning_ is one of my best qualities. But yes,” he continues, punctuating his answer with the clack of the nib as he shoves his quill into its ink pot, “my brother is well liked. Not by everyone, no one is, but by enough to be respected, and perhaps even earn himself a good reputation when everything is said and done. Not a legacy like our father’s, maybe, but a commendable one nonetheless. Now. Listen. I’ve talked myself dry,” he groans, inching towards the door with every word. “You torture me, my lady. There is no end to this education, but I promise that it does not need to be learned in a day.”

“Fine.”

It’s not like she disagrees with him— or that she wants to, even. Hilda stretches her shoulders, tipping backwards in her chair to watch a dust mote twirl through a sunbeam spilling in from outside. Responsibility has never come naturally to her. It would be easier to be a mote, she thinks, although sometimes she feels as though she’s simply being carried along a current without a rudder of her own. So maybe it isn’t so different at all. She lets her gaze blur as she ponders over the uncomfortable idea.

“Mum,” Arvid peeps in her ear. “Uncle says he’ll show me how to build boats at the oasis. Can I go?”

Hilda shakes herself alert again and turns to examine her son’s entreating smile. “Maybe tomorrow.” His smile falters. She resists the urge to tweak the round button of his nose. “Your uncle has spent enough time tutoring for one day.”

“Hardly,” Baraz intervenes from his spot at the door. “History lessons, yes, but an afternoon on the water is a different matter entirely. Besides, if I stay here I will no doubt be forced to _read_ , or even possibly _write_ , and not a memoir, to be clear, but something dreadful. Khalid wants me to take charge of the rebuilding of a section of sewers both here and in Myr. Can you imagine? Me? In the sewers? Two sets of them?” He screws his lips into a disgusted shape. “However, you’ll find no better shipbuilder in all of Almyra. Would you like to come?”

It’s an intriguing offer. Still, shipbuilding— even in the miniature, which must be what Baraz is proposing, although she’s seen the stray pleasure craft drifting in the oasis from time to time — seems like quite a bit of work. She shakes her head.

“No, thank you. I believe I’ll leave you to it. If it really isn’t any trouble?” she insists, eyeing both Arvid’s pout and Baraz’s cocky stance against the doorframe. Baraz shakes his head and waves the boy over to his side. “Alright, then,” Hilda relents. “Behave yourself, little cub. Come here. Come say goodbye to your poor old mother.”

Arvid bends closer to allow her the quick wrap of her arms around his shoulders. He skims his lips against her cheek with a rushed kiss before escaping to dash to Baraz’s side. She waves them both off from her seat, and only stands when they’ve gone, allowing herself a more uncomely stretch of her aching back. Afterwards she wanders idly to the front half of the room, studying the names Baraz had written on the parchment there.

 _Baraz al Myr_ , he’d drawn, and beside it, _Sanaz al Myr_. Hilda traces a fingertip along each letter. There’s a pattern there, of course. _Khalid al Myr_. That must be his name— the real one, not the one she’d known first as a greeting and later as a eulogy. It’s a funny thing to learn so late. More so to learn her son’s true name. He’s never been a Goneril, after all, no matter the ways he takes after them.

She trails backwards to the little desk they’d dragged there earlier for Baraz’s pulpit. His quill has been left behind. She takes it from the ink pot, tapping the excess from the nib beforeshifting her fingers into the proper grip. Her penmanship has always been good. She’d liked the art in it when she’d first learned. Still, her girlhood stubbornness has left her unprepared for the task in a second language.

Luckily, Baraz has given her a guide. Quill still lifted from the parchment, she traces his name with a practice stroke before carefully pressing the nib against the empty space below it. Most likely she writes the wrong letters. She relies on phonetics and calligraphy to make up for what she lacks. But in the end he’s there, just as boldly written as the rest of them: Arvid al Myr. 

It’s a good name, she thinks.

* * *

Hilda’s plans for an afternoon spent drowsing in her room fail ten paces from the classroom door. Thankfully she is still light on her feet despite her years spent lumbering around the hinterlands. Otherwise she might’ve become the second Leicester woman in the same number of generations to be charged with attempted regicide. 

To be fair, it’s mostly Khalid’s fault. He walks everywhere with quick, wide strides that threaten to bowl over anyone unlucky enough to find themselves in his path. Of course, no one is foolish enough to plant themselves in the trajectory of a king. No one except for her, that is.

She darts backwards with the turn of her heel just as he looks up from the fistful of papers with which he’s blinded himself. He changes course as well. Most fortuitously, neither of them make the mistake of over-correcting to tumble over the railing that separates the estate’s many terraces from the clear blue sky that hangs over Jidah.

“Sorry!” Hilda blurts, which collides with Khalid’s gasped “Forgive me!”, which she realizes is the far more polite response.

“Are you really so busy that you can’t even walk without reading?” she adds, which is equally improper. Khalid grins and knocks his stack of papers straight again with a quick shuffle against his chest.

“Yes. Walking, eating, riding— everything I do seems to be done between sheets of paper.”

“That sounds horrible.”

He laughs. Their momentum has caught up with them. They both begin to walk forward, although neither seems committed as to just where, exactly, they’re headed. “It could be worse. I knew what I was getting myself into.”

Hilda crinkles her nose. “But don’t you have someone to do that for you?”

“One day, maybe,” he sighs. “As it is now, my best advisors are too green to do delegation well. If I give this to Baraz,” he adds, wagging the papers at her, “somehow he’ll manage to build a theatre for the brothels before he fixes anything else.”

“What treachery in your ranks!”

His grin grows more wry at her feigned shock. “The better kind, at least. Don’t worry. I can manage it. I just hope that you don’t find me too terribly dull.”

Hilda’s cheeks grow hot. She hides them behind the idle swoop of her hand to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. “That depends on what you’re reading,” she says.

Khalid groans. “I’m doomed, then. This one is particularly unexciting.” He shuffles the papers with the flick of his wrist. “My father irrigated a large stretch of land in the north,” he explains once he realizes that she’s waiting for his reply. “Before then, the region had been a glorified war zone. No one had anything to eat— you could hardly blame them for what they did. Still, it was a problem. My father had the idea to expand a set of aqueducts from— here,” he says, flipping through the pages until he’s found one dominated by a map run through the center by a boldly-drawn grid. “I’ll show them to you one day. They’re incredible. I don’t know how he managed it— or how anyone first built them. It took him nearly ten years to extend them. Once he had, he realized that the bigger problem was to expect warriors and thieves to take to farming as if they’d been doing it all along.”

“But their children have started to catch on. Good news, until one of their harvests failed last year. As it turns out, they haven’t been rotating their fields. A simple solution, I thought, but of course it isn’t. How can you tell a man to keep his fields fallow if his father starved to death?”

“They don’t have anything in reserve?”

“Yes, but not everything they need. As I understand it, the only crops that’ve come through in the past year in any significant number have been radishes and cabbage. That’s not enough to feed a province, let alone to prepare a half-decent dinner. And trade has been slow to expand north, no matter how well behaved they’ve become. That’s another problem that needs to be solved. In the meantime they need grain, and salt, and wine to keep them happy when I tell them that they can’t use half of their fields. I’d rather feed them now than punish them after they’ve gone against my edict.”

“But here’s the puzzle: I can get more wine from the east, but most of their land is vineyards, so they need the grain, too. And the central plains have plenty of it, but they’ve caught wind of my interest, and now they’re claiming that they need to charge double. If I’m not careful, every loaf of bread in Almyra will be more valuable than a handful of diamonds, all because the north decided to ignore my father’s farming lessons. And if I let the north fail, they’ll be back to plundering the rest of the country in a season’s time— maybe two, if we’re lucky. They might not be very good at growing crops, but they’re exceptional at taking them.”

“And here I thought a regent’s work would be more glamorous than settling squabbles between farmers,” Hilda observes with a bent brow.

“Yes, well, between giving bread to farmers or tending to a roomful of bickering viceroys, I’ll always pick the farmer.”

Khalid sighs and gives the stack of papers a final nonplussed look before he shoves them into a pocket hidden behind the front panel of his fine robe— today a dashingly dark navy embroidered with gold, of course, this time in the form of cranes soaring across his chest in a dazzling tessellation.

“In any case, it’ll be settled eventually. I imagine the solution will be gold, which my father hoarded to a stupendous degree. Eventually we’ll run out of that too, but what’s another problem to solve?”

Hilda laughs, winded by everything he’s told her. “I remember you liking that, at least.”

“Hm?”

“Solving problems,” she explains. “Or causing them, occasionally.”

Khalid grins. “Yes. The nice thing about that is that one inevitably leads to the other.” He winks. She giggles in a pleasant, frivolous sort of way.

They’ve trailed into a garden she doesn’t recognize. Pink bougainvillea crawls above them across an arbor so thickly covered that only the faintest dapples of sunlight pattern the travertine tiles underfoot. The peach trees common to the estate’s larger courtyards have been replaced here with hulking terracotta pots filled with fat hydrangeas and spiky fronds. A set of benches is tucked between them. Claude walks with a familiar step to take a seat at one. Hilda gathers her nerve and sits beside him instead of retreating to a bench of her own.

“It’s nice in the shade,” she says before their newfound silence becomes too unwieldy. Khalid nods.

“Yes. Even in the winter, the days can be hot here in the south. Myr is better. The sea breezes keep it cool.”

“Like Derdriu.”

He smiles. It has a pained shadow to it— one that she recognizes well. “Like Derdriu,” he agrees. “Although the water has a differently tone to it. Greener. I miss the blue of Derdriu. Do you remember, in the springtime, when they’d float paper lanterns in the canals?”

“The Siren Festival,” she explains with a smile of her own. “Do you know the story behind it?”

Khalid shakes his head.

“The legend goes that a merchant from Edmund was sailing home from Sreng when a terrible storm nearly capsized him. He found himself off-course and missing three-quarters of his crew when the skies cleared. There was no hope for him to make the passage safely— not until a shoal of sirens appeared and tossed their seaweed nets around his bow to lead him home.”

“I thought that sirens were man-eaters?”

“Faerghans, maybe, but not proud Leicester men!” Hilda laughs. “Apparently the sirens loved the lanterns that the merchant kept burning on his deck, and so as a way of thanking them, each year we’d send them more.” She leans against the bench, head lolling slightly as she stares into the knotted bougainvillea. “My father would always take us. Half the time Holst would set his lantern on fire before he’d even managed to drop it into the canal, but he was careful with mine. I was always afraid I’d fall and ruin my clothes, so of course I made him do it. But I loved how they all looked at the end: like diamonds against all of that blue.”

Khalid doesn’t reply. Her chest tightens with her next inhale.

“You haven’t gone back, have you?” she asks him. He shakes his head at the corner of her eye.

“I couldn’t stand to think about it,” he admits lowly.

“Neither could I.”

His hand creeps across the bench to brush his smallest finger against her own. She focuses on the warmth of their tentative touch and wills it into the old, icy gaps in her chest.

“I’d like to see it again,” she decides. She tears her gaze from the arbor overhead to look him in the eye. His face, suddenly somber, is like a mirror. She forces a smile onto her lips to break the effect. “If Edelgard knows who you are, there’s nothing to keep us away, right? The city must still stand. She wouldn’t have done anything to it.”

“It’s a thriving port— even more than it was before, if her court is to be believed.”

“Well, then. It’s decided.” She brushes the wrinkles from her lap with the nervous stroke of her free hand. “Not too soon, though. Flying here was trouble enough, and Myr next, and all of the business of learning how to live there— without your brother’s help, might I add, as he seems to think that it’s something one learns innately, somehow— but after that, and maybe a season more in between...In the spring, perhaps.” The thought emboldens her. Her smile loses some of its strain. “Arvid will love the lanterns. He’s most likely swimming in the oasis now, you know. Adding fire to the mix would win him over for certain. And I doubt Derdriu has forgotten about the festival. They won’t want to disappoint the sirens.”

Khalid sweeps the rest of his fingers over hers and grips her hand. “We’ll do it,” he promises. “Just say the word and we’ll go.”

His hold tightens. She squeezes back. The callouses she remembers from their past have disappeared. Now his hand is soft and broad, although she can still feel the strength in his fingers. It seems unfair that her own hands have grown rough and scarred. And yet he seems indifferent to it, brushing his thumb along her skin with such gentle attention that she can hardly watch it happen without losing her breath.

“I’ll be happy to see it,” he adds quietly. “Even during the war, I think I was happiest in Derdriu. My grandfather was a good man.” Hilda nods in agreement. They both watch as he continues to stroke her hand. “Do you remember our dinners together?”

Her cheeks must turn pink. Khalid is gracious not to mention it. “I do,” she says. He smiles.

“My grandfather hated them. I’d be useless on those days— thinking of things to tell you instead of doing what I’d been charged to do. It was very inconvenient for him.”

“You’re joking.”

“Unfortunately not,” he laughs. “You’d think I’d be better at doing two things at once. And even then, you’d always best me once we made it to the table. You had the most wonderful stories.”

“Gossip and nasty rumors!”

“I think, with the benefit of hindsight, that it really wasn’t so much what you had to say that left me so fascinated.”

She focuses more intently on the shape of his fingers to ignore the heat spilling from her cheeks onto her nape.

“Well,” she manages, “you were very clever, too, you know. Too clever, really. I always worried that you found our dinners boring.”

“Boring,” he echoes incredulously. “Is that honestly what you thought?”

“You’ve always been a difficult man to read.”

“And yet it felt as though you could see right through me.”

She wonders if the same holds true now. Hand-in-hand or not, they are no longer young hopefuls wrestling with the humble pretense of a well-laid dinner between them. Part of her wants to lay it all bare. After all, what’s the point in reviving their naive courtship for a second fumbling attempt? And yet it seems impossible, especially here, in a city she doesn’t know, in a a garden she’s never seen, dressed in clothes she’s never worn before.

It would be easier to kiss him. A stepping stone, perhaps, to something greater, once she’s gathered the nerve. She tips ever so slightly closer to him. He mimics the move more eagerly. His gaze grows half lidded and slips to her mouth. There’s a nakedness to the gesture that thrills her. It kindles something kindred in her own breast. She leans closer. A shiver tickles over her skin, bright and crackling.

A deep voice clears its throat. She’s never heard Khalid use such a register before. “ _Your Grace_ ,” it adds.

Hilda jolts away. Khalid lingers, eyes screwing shut as he allows himself a frustrated sigh. 

“ _Babak_ ,” he grumbles. Hilda turns. So it is. The man stands a polite distance away, bowed slightly at the waist, either from courtesy or from the height of the arbors, or perhaps both. He makes little effort to hide a grin. Hilda fiddles with her clothes in a failed attempt to ignore how desperately she suddenly wishes to disintegrate. “ _What is it?_ ”

“ _Men from the capital, Your Grace._ ”

“ _Has it fallen?_ ” Khalid asks dryly.

Babak laughs. “ _You know you can’t leave your ducklings alone for too long. They’ve already paced bald spots in my rugs. You can’t afford to replace them, so I’d suggest you give them the audience they’ve come for._ ”

Khalid runs his hand over his face and huffs another annoyed sound into his palm. “ _Fine_.” He stands. Hilda does as well, although she isn’t certain why. “I’m sorry,” he adds as he turns to face her.

“It’s alright. An audience sounds more interesting than reading about aqueducts, at least.”

He smiles. “Maybe not, but I appreciate your optimism. Babak can show you back to your rooms, or elsewhere, if you’d prefer.” He gestures at the man, who steps forward along with the polite dip of his head. Khalid’s voice lowers into an annoyed grumble. “He can do something helpful, for once in his life.” 

“No, no, thank you,” Hilda sputters. The last thing she needs is to face the gentle giant’s interrogation about what he’s just seen— as certainly he doesn’t seem to be of the sort to prefer discretion over the opportunity to tease his king —especially not if she’s expected to do it in Almyran. “I wouldn’t want to inconvenience him. Besides, I’ve come to learn my way around. I’ll manage without an escort.”

“Of course, if that’s what you’d like.” Khalid brushes his hand over the fine embroidery patterning his chest. “I’m afraid that this means I’ll be occupied for dinner. Will you be content to see to it on your own? I’m sure Baraz and Sanaz will prefer your company to mine.”

Hilda nods. It’s not like this is the first time they’ve broken bread with the king’s absence at the head of their table. She suspects it won’t be the last, either.

“But I’ll shake them by the morning,” he continues, almost pleadingly. She smiles.

“Breakfast it is, then.”

He dips his head at her and gives her a final look before he turns and falls into his usual brisk pace to sweep through the garden entrance. Babak waves at her with a charming candidness before following after him.

It’s the second time that day that she’s been left behind. She shrugs off her hurt feelings by forcing herself to walk a circle around the garden, although she doesn’t bother to look too closely at the flowers. By the second pass she realizes that she’s being ridiculous, and cuts her path short to return to the terraces outside.

Khalid and Baraz are long gone, of course. They’ve been replaced by a milling crowd of serving girls stringing sheets along a long cord to dry in the afternoon wind. They give her no heed as she walks between them to breathe in the clean soap perfuming the air. Afterwards she turns right, and slips into the shadows of a tall arcade that runs along the estate’s southern spine.

The corridor is nearly empty. She finds herself in the sole company of a tabby cat licking languidly at its paws. The creature watches her with half-attention, coiling and uncoiling its striped tail while it continues its fastidious cleaning. Hilda considers petting it before deciding against it. She suspects she already seems rather foolish to the estate staff. Cat scratches won’t improve her reputation. She settles on crouching beside the creature instead in order to admire it from a safe distance.

It doesn’t take long for her mind to wander.

“...I’m a fool,” she admits in a miserable whisper. The tabby mewls its agreement. Hilda sighs and rests her forehead against her knees.

It must be foolishness. After all, she’s far too old to be stealing kisses in a garden. Khalid can’t be expected to court her. She’s already birthed his son, after all. And of course he’s too busy to dote after her like a young maiden expecting a daily promenade. He’s a king— and not just the sort that she’s accustomed to, but a king to Almyra in all of her ancient, sprawling grandeur.

But what the hell does that mean? Is she expected to fall into the role of a sexless matron, having already done her duty by supplying him with a satisfactory heir? Or is she meant to seduce him? And is it even remotely possible that she’s the only one? After all, his father had entertained two wives without any of the scandal that it would’ve brought him in Leicester. What more, Leicester had been the unusual party by that standard. Even the old southern Emperor had sired more children than a studhorse.

She bends upwards to stare wearily at the cat. It yawns and shakes its head.

“You’re right,” she agrees, finally daring to reach forward to scratch tentatively at the creatures haunches. The move wins her a purr. “He’s not like that.”

And he isn’t. Is he? Surely neither Khalid nor Baraz would treat Arvid like a godling if he was only one of many— especially not if he found himself in competition with children raised in the proper Almyran way, whatever that means, and not reared alongside goats.

“...I don’t know.”

The cat stiffens at her admission. She frowns as it escapes her reach and suddenly dashes away, just like the rest of them. She nearly sinks into another round of self pity before she hears the footsteps that’d spooked her furry companion.

She turns and spots a young man at the far end of the arcade. He’s dressed in a handsome olive green ensemble. Almyra’s mounted archer is sewn prominently over his breast. If they’re anything like Leicester was, she suspects this means that he’s a member of the royal court.

 _A duckling_ , she thinks, remembering Babak’s words with a smirk. She stands as the young man comes closer. Curiously, he seems not to notice her at all. His attention is directed entirely on a collection of scrolls hugged to his chest. Her own sinks at the sight. Surely Khalid will have no time for breakfast once he’s taken ownership of whatever demands those scrolls contain.

“ _Gods,_ ” the young man mutters. He stops mid-stride to carefully set his cargo onto the shelf of one of the arcade’s arched sills. “ _Gods help me._ ”

He rubs his hands over his face and drags them through his hair. Curly hair, just like Arvid’s, she notes, which must be why she bothers to take a step closer to him.

“ _Are you alright?_ ” she asks him, trying her best not to wince at how thickly the words tumble from her tongue.

The young man jumps and spins to face her. He takes stock of her with the quick sweep of his eyes. That morning she’d selected an attractive outfit provided to her by Laleh so that she wouldn’t wear her new rose ensemble threadbare. She’d suspected it to have come from the serving-woman’s own wardrobe, although both the skirt and blouse are of a lavender silk instead of the dove-grey common to the staff, at least. It earns her a polite half-bow from the man in spite of how comically out of place she must seem, not to mention her elementary Almyran.

“ _Yes, ma’am. Forgive me. I did not mean to disturb you._ ”

Hilda shakes her head and gives him a warm smile. “ _You haven’t. Have you come from Myr?_ ”

“ _I have._ ”

“ _Then you must have come to speak with the king._ ” Hilda eyes the scrolls. It wouldn’t be such a terrible idea to get a head start on them. Maybe she can even help Khalid determine his next steps. She’d once been known to do such a thing on occasion, however rare.

The young man stiffens. “ _It is not a matter for me to discuss,_ ” he says in a low and cautious voice. 

“ _A secret,_ ” she compromises, struggling to find the proper words to be more discreet with what she means to say. “ _You don’t need to share it._ ”

The young man nods. He bounces on his toes. Next he wrings his hands and peeks over his shoulder at the courtyard. Hilda realizes that Khalid must’ve made a court out of the tall, ivy-covered building at the estate’s center, which to that point had fallen under Babak’s personal domain.

“ _Have you spoken with the king before?_ ”

“ _Yes,_ ” the young man replies, eyes still over his shoulder. He attempts to will some pride into his voice. It falls a little flat. “ _I represent His Greatness the Grand Vizier._ ”

“ _Important work._ ”

“ _Yes._ ” The young man fiddles with a jacket button. He must be an archer. His fingers pull too hard and wrench the button loose. He curses under his breath.

Hilda can’t help but chuckle at his horrified frown. “ _I’m sure the king won’t count your buttons._ ”

The young man doesn’t seem convinced. He pushes the button uselessly against his jacket and curses again. Hilda wishes she had a needle on her, but she has a feeling that if she leaves him to hunt one out, he’ll hide before she can find him again.

“ _Relax,_ ” she insists, hoping it will do nearly as much good as sewing his button back in place. The young man’s face falls.

“ _I think perhaps you have not sought an audience with His Eminence the King, ma’am,_ ” he says.

It’s a peculiar statement. She purses her lips to reply— although with what she isn’t quite certain, given that they’ve kept her identity a secret beyond Khalid’s siblings and clever Laleh, if perhaps unintentionally; and even then it seems to have been a half-formed idea, given that she can’t fully describe her own situation herself —but is interrupted by the snap of the young man’s head. Someone has called for him from the ivy-covered hall. He dashes for the scrolls and tucks them neatly beneath his arm.

“ _Good day._ ” His voice cracks. He scampers forward before she has a chance to repeat his words. She watches as he approaches the hall like a lamb to a lion’s den. Her third abandonment of the day— and this time unusual, indeed. 

* * *

Khalid doesn’t seem like a lion at breakfast, although he does look tired. Arvid makes up for his father’s ennui with a boastful retelling of his visit to the oasis. A small balsam boat complete with a rudder and a handkerchief sail sits proudly as a centerpiece to their table. It stars in his story, too. 

“..and then it looked like it was going to sink,” he exclaims in a dizzying pidgin of Fodlani and Almyran (the start of a bad habit, Hilda realizes, although she appreciates the opportunity to keep track of just what it is he’s saying), “but then it turned, and the wind filled the sail, and it went all the way to the buoy!”

“The finish line,” Baraz explains over a mouthful of cinnamon bread and peach preserves. “Solidly ahead of my own fine vessel, although it must be said that there was treachery in the victory.”

“A duck,” Arvid says. He grins and turns to Hilda. “A duck attacked his boat and turned it over.”

“I suppose she mistook it for a mallard,” Baraz sighs. He takes a sip of tea before continuing, “Perhaps it would be best to call it a draw.”

“No way!”

Khalid laughs. “That’s right, Arvid. Don’t let him pull that over on you. You bested him, fair and square.”

Arvid’s face brightens delightedly. “Come with us next time! I’ll show you how to make the sails!”

“I’d like that very much.”

Khalid catches Hilda’s eye. A splendid warmth washes over her. It’s easy in that moment to forget her misgivings. She smiles at him. His gaze lingers. Perhaps this is the finest breakfast she’s ever had.

Arvid’s bright giggles suddenly bounce across the courtyard. “Azzi, what are you doing?”

The wyvernling slinks from its spot under the table to crawl into Arvid’s lap. The time has already come and gone when he’d grown too large for human chairs. His swinging tail topples over a carafe. Sanaz ducks just before she’s pelted by a spray of grapes. She laughs so loud that Hilda can barely hear herself think.

“Arvid!” she chides, snatching for him uselessly between scampering claws and scales. Arvid gasps and giggles as Azzi smothers him with the cramped flap of his wings. “Azzi—Goddess, _careful_!”

A bloodcurdling screech answers her. Hilda freezes, lips pulling back into a snarl as she realizes too late that Azzi isn’t begging Arvid for attention— he’s trying to _protect_ him. A shadow falls across their table before she has the chance to even to begin to consider how to arm herself. She looks desperately to Khalid.

“ _Gods damn it_ ,” he groans. 

He does not leap to his feet as she’d expect a king of his stature when faced with a sudden incursion. Rather, he simply pinches the bridge of his nose and stares glumly at the sky above. At his right hand, his brother— whom Hilda had assumed, with that ridiculous dagger always strapped to his hip, was better equipped for such moments — hides a bewildered smirk behind his hand. Sanaz doubles down on her laughter so raucously that it seems as though she’ll soon make herself hoarse.

At least Azzi appears to remember himself. He flares his wings and yowls. The noise is swallowed up by another horrible howl. A gust of wind ruins the rest of their breakfast spread. Hilda watches, both dazed and horrified, as a massive blood-red wyvern makes landfall in the adjacent courtyard.

“ _You’ve told her,_ ” Khalid snaps at Baraz.

“ _As if I’d have to do something like that for her to come here,_ ” Baraz replies defensively. “ _And like hell I’d get anything out of it._ ”

“ _If I didn’t know better,_ ” a voice booms from the red wyvern’s back, “ _I’d think that you’ve abdicated, boy._ ”

The wyvern scrapes low against the courtyard to ease its rider’s dismount. It is a woman, neither petite nor towering, with a thick braid tossed over her shoulder that’s the same fiery shade as her mount. She’s dressed in gold and olive green. Her clothes remind Hilda of what Sanaz wears now that they’ve left the west’s winter chill: well-tailored trousers cut high against the ankle, slender-toed boots, and an austere top accented by stern, angular darts at the breast like the chestplate of a suit of arms.

Her sleeves are cropped at the elbows and paired by a glove on her right hand. They betray her as an archer. So too does the quiver lashed diagonally against her swinging stirrups. She’s dressed herself in a riding cloak as well, but tosses it thoughtlessly aside when she slips from her saddle. Hilda’s gaze settles last on the sash belted across her middle. It’s striped with olive, and gold, and scarlet, a twin to the one Khalid wears beneath his fine outer robes.

Like Khalid, she studies Hilda with a pair of emerald green eyes.

“Hilda Valentine Goneril,” she says with a slow, long-drawn surprise, slipping into Hilda’s mother tongue with the same ease she uses to approach their table unchallenged. “That is you, isn’t it? I’d recognize that ridiculous hair anywhere.”

Khalid finally stands. “What are you doing here?”

“I’d ask you the same question. Have you mistaken Jidah for Enbarr?”

“Farzin has been informed of the summit’s outcome.”

The woman nods. “Yes. He tells me that you managed yourself well. Is it so odd for a mother to seek out her son and congratulate him on his great victory?”

Her eyes trail from Khalid’s scowl to the wyvernling still snarling toothlessly at the far end of the table. Arvid manages to wrestle Azzi low enough against his lap to peek over the creature and finally see who’s broken their breakfast peace. The woman’s lips part slightly at the sight of him before forming a mysterious smile. 

“Come with me,” Khalid snaps before anyone else can speak. He takes the woman by her elbow and steers her towards his borrowed quarters. “Baraz,” he adds over his shoulder, punctuating the order with the toss of his chin towards Hilda. 

“ _Surely you haven’t come here to hide something away,_ ” Hilda hears the woman suggest as Khalid continues to usher her off. She looks to Baraz for some hint about just what the hell has happened— and, more importantly, what the hell she’s supposed to do. He shrugs.

“If you’d like to do more in Jidah,” Sanaz says at Hilda’s side, finally recovered from her laughter, “you’d better do it now.”

* * *

Hilda spends her dwindling time pacing a ring into the shady bougainvillea garden’s ancient travertine. Amused at first, Arvid grows bored by her seventh revolution, and begs her to allow him to inspect the beastly red wyvern left untethered in the courtyard. She denies the request (much to Azzi’s apparent relief, who huffs, still flustered by the appearance of a new challenger to Arvid’s attention), but grants his subsequent plea to return to the oasis with Baraz. He tells her that he intends to catch the waterfowl that’d scuttled his uncle’s boat in order to keep it as a pet. Baraz promises her that he’ll do no such thing, although she isn’t certain that she can trust him. 

It’s better than tripping over them while she fumbles with her thoughts. Sanaz seems to have the decency to understand the predicament, at least. She lingers just outside the garden, entertaining herself by honing the edge of a pocket knife under the arbor’s long-cast shade. Hilda sinks herself into a new harried thought with each rasping scrape of the blade.

It’s obvious what’s happened, of course. Tiana von Riegan has come. The morning’s fearsome rider can’t possibly be anyone else. And Sanaz must be correct about her own assumption, too: that Tiana has come to fetch Khalid home. None of this is unexpected. Faced with its inevitability, however, Hilda suddenly feels as though she’s been knocked from her feet.

For one thing, Baraz has taught her next to nothing about Myr. Her Almyran is no better than that of a precocious toddler. Three quarters of her wardrobe consists of borrowed clothes that must be returned if she doesn’t intend to leave kind Laleh with nothing but cheesecloth to wear. Arvid has come around splendidly to the notion of having a father, but neither she nor Khalid has properly tempered his expectations for what it means to be a prince. Quite frankly, Hilda would also appreciate the lesson on her expectations as queen— or whatever the hell it is that she is.

She slumps onto one of the benches and buries her face in her hands. Of course she’s not a queen. Even Baraz calls Khalid a king on occasion. And according to him Tiana still holds the title, dowager or otherwise. Perhaps Hilda will win herself _queen mother_ , but it’s not like that’s a prize. She might as well be sent to a nunnery with a name like that.

Her stomach rumbles. She thinks miserably of the fruits and pastries scattered across their ruined breakfast table. It’s long past lunchtime, now— another meal that finds her as the odd party seeking out company among dining partners otherwise engaged. Maybe she can sneak herself into the kitchens and be done with it. Certainly there must be at least one kind-hearted cook there to take pity on her.

She slips her fingers from her face and stands. So it’s settled: a stolen lunch, and then perhaps a nap, so that she can pretend the day has been nothing more than a strange fever dream. It’s not so terrible a plan, even if it is pathetic.

Like most well-intentioned strategies, it fails stupendously.

A shadow falls across the arched arbor leading into the garden. Sanaz doesn’t challenge it, but she does pocket her blade and bow her head at its approach. For a quick-lived moment Hilda wonders if perhaps Khalid has come to her rescue, but the notion is summarily quashed by the flash of red hair.

“Hilda,” Tiana greets her simply. She walks with her son’s ferocious pace. Suddenly she’s too close. Hilda can smell the windswept scent of wyvern-riding on her clothes. In their nearness she can see the silver plaited through her braid, too, as well as the sun-darkened freckles splattered across her cheeks. Age has not changed her from her reputation. She is still beautiful, and unabashedly intimidating. “What have you done to my son?”

The accusation freezes Hilda’s response in her throat. Goddess, is she about to be _condemned_? She feels a dark scowl creep unbidden across her face. Tiana laughs and sweeps her into a bone-popping hug.

“You damned Gonerils.” She pulls away to hold Hilda at an arm’s distance. Her hands are like vice grips on her shoulders. “I thought those bastards killed us all. What a sight you are. Look how well you’ve grown.” She rubs her hands approvingly over Hilda’s upper arms. It is so utterly unexpected that Hilda lets her do it without a peep of reprimand.

“My father wanted to marry you to my poor brother. Did you know that? Thank the gods that he didn’t, the old fool, rest his bones. But he had the right idea. Goneril and Riegan. That’s a history that even Myr can’t scoff at. Gods. It made me sick to think those southern buzzards had brought an end to it.”

“I...” Hilda starts, but she isn’t certain what else to say. Of course she’d known about the betrothal. Should she tell Tiana that she’d been the one to convince her father to turn it down? Is it any better to admit that she’d chosen Tiana’s son’s bed instead?

Tiana’s eyes crinkle mischievously while a flush rushes across Hilda’s cheeks.

“Yes, you indeed,” she says. “But you haven’t answered my question. What the hell have you done to my son?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Hilda manages. Tiana smiles and pats her roughly on the shoulder.

“Well, let me tell you, Goneril girl. They called your father the Old Bear, didn’t they?”

They had. She nods. He’d loved the moniker. She’d always worried that it would somehow pass on to her. She doesn’t know why any of that could possibly matter now.

“A good name. I think my father resented him for it. _The Duke_ was all he ever was. But I’ve collected a few names for myself.” Tiana grins. “Some nasty, some nice. And my dear husband had a fine one: the Summer King, they called him. A king of sun and plenty.” She releases Hilda and steps backwards to admire the garden’s pink blooms with her hands planted sharply at her hips. “I figured it’d catch on with his sons. Plenty of seasons to pick from, you understand? But I didn’t think my boy would earn the worst of them. They called him a craven when he came crawling home, but now? The Winter King. That’s what he is.”

Hilda’s molars grind. If she were in the company of anyone else she’d bite back from what Tiana’s said about Khalid, but she’s his mother, isn’t she? How can she talk about him like that?

“Do you want to know why?” Tiana asks. She’s toying with her. Hilda’s temper flares more brightly alight. But there’s an important lesson here, too, she knows— one that Baraz won’t teach her.

“What is it?” she grits.

Tiana smiles. It seems more complicated that it looks. “We need winter,” she explains. “It soothes the earth from the harvest and sends the meanest beasts into their beds. But winter is harsh and barren. That’s what the Empire did to my son. Took Leicester from him and returned him to me a ruined man.”

“He protected Leicester,” Hilda snaps. “Alone, knowing that he’d fail, because there wasn’t anyone else to do a damned thing about it.”

“Not alone. You stood with him.”

Hilda opens her mouth and snaps it shut again. It’s impossible to understand just what Tiana wants from her.

“Derdriu was my city, you know,” the older woman continues. The brassy confidence in her voice has disappeared. She steps backwards a pace to sink onto one of the benches. “I was born there. Godfrey was born there. My father, too. They buried my mother in the rose garden. She loved those flowers. I never gave a damn about them, but I gave a damn about my people. I gave a damn about my son. I’m _thanking_ you for what you’ve done, Hilda, even if I don’t know how you’ve done it. I owe you an enormous debt.”

Hilda falters. This isn’t what she expected. She lingers for a moment longer before taking a seat on the other bench.

“Leicester was my country, too,” she says finally with a quiet voice.

“Of course it was,” Tiana sighs. “That doesn’t meant that it could’ve survived a war. Those bickering old men couldn’t save themselves from a rainstorm. Not your father. Not mine. But our people still live. Today, for the first time in nearly ten years, my son smiled when he spoke to me— was _proud_ of something. Told me that he has a boy of his own. An heir. A Riegan. A Goneril.”

Hilda realizes she’s been holding her breath. She lets it whistle from her lips and nods, as if to finally recognize just how improbable it all is. Tiana’s eyes steady on her, verdant as the garden’s leaves. 

“You’ll make a good queen,” she says.

Hilda laughs hollowly.It’s not like she means to, just that she can’t stop herself. “I don’t know what that means,” she admits.

Tiana grins. “Pah! Neither did I. When I first arrived in Myr I was certain I’d been brought there to hang. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a snake pit, just like any other royal court. They’ll bite at you, but you’ll survive it. You’ll learn. We daughters of Leicester have the spine for it.”

“But Leicester was so _small_ ,” Hilda argues. “Almyra is...”

“Beautiful.” Tiana says the word with such reverence that it somehow calms Hilda’s crackling nerves. “Deserts, ancient forests, cities as large as kingdoms; valleys that stare into the heart of the earth, great plains filled with ice that never melts, sparkling under a sun that always shines. It’s taken me a lifetime to see all of it. How little we were taught, you and I, when we were girls... Like songbirds in a cage convinced that our bars were the world.”

Hilda shakes her head. “I don’t understand how I could claim any part of it.”

“You’ll earn it, the same way my son has. Don’t look so terrified,” she laughs. “You’ve already worked miracles. I’d come to terms with one of Baraz’s blockheaded boys chasing after the crown, you know. They’re sweet children, but their father’s too soft to make kings. I had no choice but to live until I was blind and bald to keep them in line. But a Riegan child? Ha! Now I’ll be able die while I’ve still got my wits, bless you. I’d bend the knee and kiss your fingers now if I wasn’t so stiff from my ride.”

“Please don’t,” Hilda stammers. Tiana laughs until tears bead in her eyes.

“Gods save you, Goneril. What a fine queen you’ll be.”

* * *

Hilda walks through the Jidah’s high streets in a daze. Ostensibly she’d gone there to bolster her empty wardrobe after she and Tiana had parted ways earlier that afternoon, but even the noise of the crowd can’t bleed through what the dowager’s said to her. And out of everything she’d told her, one thing had been abundantly clear: Hilda’s tutelage as a Duke’s daughter is as useless for her current charge as learning to ride a pony in the hopes of taming a wild stallion. 

Tiana tells her that she’ll help her, but Hilda can’t imagine that she’ll make a much better instructor than Baraz. Surely Khalid is the only one who’ll truly be able to solve her problem. It’s what he’s always been good at, in any case. But even after the sun has started to dip towards the horizon, he’s still shut away in his borrowed court. So she walks through the markets with Sanaz at her heels and doubles back on every crowded street until her feet ache.

She returns to the estate with nothing but blisters and the grease from their street-stall dinner on her fingertips. Sanaz says her farewells at the doorstep into Hilda’s rooms, trading duties with Baraz, who’s returned from his trip to the oasis and assumed his usual post at the railing outside. That means that Arvid is inside. The idea brightens Hilda’s mood until she slips inside and finds him already asleep in his bed, arm strung around his balsam boat like a beloved doll. She retreats to the sitting room and picks at an impeccable arrangement of peaches and red berries until the quiet night nearly drives her mad.

“Baraz,” she whispers, cracking open the front door.

“Is everything alright?” He’s quick to leave his post and join her at the door.

“Yes, everything is fine, just... Khalid.” She leans through the doorway and glances down the pathway outside. “Is he still meeting with members of the court?”

Baraz’s lips slip into a sly little smile. “No. He’s escaped them. He’s there, in his rooms.”

Hilda locks eyes with him and wills her best attempt at cool indifference. “Tell me, would it be improper if I met with him?”

“To whom, exactly?” Baraz’s smile deepens rakishly. “I think you might be going about this backwards.”

“Oh,” Hilda huffs, shoving forward into the passageway. “Enough. Fine. But stay close here, won’t you, in case Arvid wakes?”

“Of course.”

“And don’t look at me like that. I’m simply going to _speak_ with him.”

“Naturally.” Baraz leans against the wall and crosses his arms over his chest. “But if you change your mind... My daughter could use a companion. She’s not yet had her first birthday. The timing wouldn’t be so terrible.”

Hilda decides not to dignify his suggestion with a response. She turns on her heel instead and ignores Baraz’s muffled laughter as she walks quickly towards the terrace’s far end. Khalid’s door looks no different from her own. That isn’t so bad. She swallows her nerves and quietly knocks her knuckles against it.

“ _What is it? Come in,_ ” she hears from inside.

“Hilda,” Khalid adds with a surprised gasp after she’s opened the door and found him buried in correspondence at what must have been, at one point, a large and handsome desk dragged off-kilter inside. He stands and knocks over a tower of torn envelopes with his elbow. His half-swallowed curses help to remind her that he isn’t the bogeyman that everyone else seems to have mistaken him for. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, closing the door behind her before dancing forward to help him with this newest mess.

“Not at all,” he insists, knelt at her side. “I meant to come and find you as soon as I finished with— well, you can see that _finishing_ isn’t necessarily a realistic goal.” He glances at his desk in dismay. “Here, don’t worry with that. You can sit here,” he adds, leaping to his feet to brush away more abandoned sheets of paper to unveil a large settee. A quick dig at the table beside it unveils a carafe of water and a full decanter of pale wine along with a peach pit that Hilda can only hope did not constitute his dinner entire.

“My mother,” he adds, as if he’s just remembered the day behind them, “she wasn’t too awful with you, was she? I told her to leave you in peace, but I doubt she listened to me.”

Hilda smiles and stands to take a seat at the settee. “She was...gracious.” Khalid cocks a brow. “She was _kind_ ,” she corrects, which is true, really, she supposes. “I met her once, as a little girl, you know. It was a lovely reunion.”

Khalid sighs and rubs at his eyes. “I can’t imagine you’ve had another reunion quite like it. I should’ve known she’d come here, of course, just that I wasn’t expecting _that_. I’m sorry.”

“It’s really nothing.”

“She noticed Arvid immediately,” he adds with the guilty dip of his head.

“I know.”

“I’ve told her not to speak with him unless she’s spoken to you first.”

“I don’t think it will be any trouble.”

“You don’t know my mother the way I do,” Khalid counters dryly.

“Well, no,” Hilda admits with the tip of her chin, “but she seemed so... _pleased_.”

“Of course she is.” Khalid leans against the back of his desk and scrubs his hand through his tousled hair. His gaze darts again towards his endless paperwork. “But I don’t want her getting any ideas about making Arvid’s childhood look anything like mine. We can talk about it more, though, I just— there’s one other damned summons that I have to sign before the last courier’s left for the night.”

“Yes, of course. It’s alright,” she reassures him. His shoulders slump defeatedly.

“At least in Myr I won’t have to do everything in writing. It isn’t always like this.”

“It’s fine, Khalid. I understand. Besides, you’ve always been drawn to the most boring things. I don’t mind keeping you company as long as you don’t try to rope me into them.”

He laughs. “Fair enough. It won’t take me too long.” He circles around his desk to hunt out his chair. “And then we can talk about whatever you like. Not my mother, preferably. I want to hear about how you found the market.”

He’s already hidden himself behind a handful of notes. Hilda smiles at him. It doesn’t bother her that he can’t see her. The cluttered room really isn’t so different from his office in Derdriu. No matter how prolific he is in his work, he’s never been well organized. The nostalgia is reassuring. She swings her legs over the end of the settee and settles herself more comfortably against the cushions.

A locust chirps outside. The pages rustle in Khalid’s grip. Occasionally he mutters aloud a particularly complicated line, but he speaks too quickly for her to parse the words. Her eyelids grow heavy. There is a clock somewhere. She can’t find it. Most likely he’s buried it underneath a mountain of rejected missives. It ticks away each second with a muffled _toc_. The room smells good: paper, candle wax, vetiver, old books. She lets her gaze grow unfocused. It seems preposterous to think that anyone would ever equate any of this, these trappings so common to him, with the winter chill. To her he’s always been as warm and comforting as the heavy blanket draped over her shoulders.

Wait.

She snaps open her eyes and bolts upright. A dark bedroom greets her. It’s nearly identical to her own, except that there’s another desk here, too, stacked high with enough books to be mistaken as a library shelf. She can just make out the shapes of their thick spines from the moonlight spilling through the window. It must be late. Even the hum from the market has disappeared.

She skims her hand over the bed. The sheets beside her are cool and neatly made. She stiffens, ears pricked for any warning sounds. Finding none, she sneaks forward to press her cheek against the bed’s empty pillow. It smells like the clean soap from the laundry— and then, beneath that, earthy and verdant, the same as Khalid’s fine clothes.

Hilda lingers a little longer before her pride catches up with her and forces her from the bed. She creeps over the floorboards, careful not to trod over a stray riding glove. No matter the hour, she knows exactly where she’ll find him: still bent over his desk in the adjacent sitting room just like she’d accidentally left him, the shadows under his eyes darker than ever as he attempts to solve the country’s problems before the sun rises. It’s absurd. If she masters only a single duty of her strange queenship, it will be to insist that he occasionally sleep.

Khalid proves her wrong. His desk is empty. Its master lays sprawled along the sitting room’s settee. His robe has been left behind, folded haphazardly over the desk chair along with his particolored sash. One boot remains under the chair. The other has been kicked dangerously close to an expensive-looking vase.

Stripped to his shirtsleeves and trousers, it’s easy to forget that he’s something greater than a simple man. His hand is tossed over his eyes. It twitches slightly in his sleep. One of his dark locks sneaks between his fingers and turns into a curlicue against his palm. Hilda steps closer to extinguish the set of stubby candles on his desk. She tiptoes through the dark, listening for his quiet snoring to find her way.

He doesn’t stir when she sits beside him. There’s just enough space left on the settee for her to curl against his side. She does so slowly until her knees slot around his own and her nose is pressed against the space between his collarbones. He stirs just when she dares to close her eyes.

She waits for his reprimand. He is the Winter King, after all. He might find her charming in the gardens, but now she’s come to him when he’s stripped of all of his finery and thoroughly unarmed. It isn’t fair for her to sneak into his embrace. Still, it’s worth it to pretend that they’re someone else, if only for a fleeting moment, just like she’d once imagined that Arvid was a poor man’s son— and her only a woman, free to the fancies of smelling the sun on Khalid’s skin with his heartbeat thudding against her own.

He shifts against her. Her breath catches in her throat. The voice she’s waiting for never comes. His arm rests lightly against her side. His fingers comb through her hair. The stroke of his hand is hypnotizing. It feels as though he’s found a loose thread to pull. It unravels the weight from her shoulders.

They’ll leave tomorrow, abandoning this place she hardly recognizes to be thrown into the crucible of her new life. To hell with all of it, she thinks, pressing her cheek against his chest. She can stand it. Let the new day come.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Off to Myr next chapter — it’s going to be a good one! :) A huge thanks as always to everyone for reading and commenting!


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